


What Wicked Webs We un-Weave

by meinposhbastard



Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Happy Ending, M/M, POV Alternating, Romance, Slow Burn, suffocation (not between main)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-01 23:45:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16294244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meinposhbastard/pseuds/meinposhbastard
Summary: Wade and Dopinder manage a small ship that looks like it’s running on spit and a prayer. After picking up a distress signal, they find a life-pod that contains only one person: an arachnid-themed assassin-for-hire Wade knows by name if not by reputation.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Huge chimichanga thanks to my Alpha and Beta, [Noir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pineau_noir/pseuds/Pineau_noir), who helped me come up with the title, combine the two synopsis I had and offer more pop cultural references as well as weed out typos. Last but not least, my friend and brainstorming partner, [Xim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ximeria/), whom I high five for the first round of pop references, cheering me on when I was unsure if this or that scene sounded good, and all-around English correction ninja because English is hard and sometimes Google doesn't know everything.
> 
> This fic's title is provided by the wonderful Noir who came up with "Wicked Webs" which is a reference to Ricky and Morty, who, in turn, reference [Sir Walter Scott](http://rickandmorty.wikia.com/wiki/File:S2e6_spider_puns.png/). But then I saw the whole reference (the current title) and almost went with the shorter version but then my inner Wade went like "alliteration, darling, alliteration. You have that talk in your fic" and since I'm not one to miss such a golden opportunity, I grabbed hold of it and here we are discussing about it.
> 
> Enjoy y'all! XD

_Mr. Pool, sir?”_

_“I’m gonna knock you out~ Mamma said knock you out~”_ Deadpool sings as he jumps up on the last step, twirls around and slides into one of the two seats. “Dopinder, what did I say about using my antihero name?”

 _“To never use it unless the situation requires it,”_ Dopinder says, his voice pressing some consonants. _“But sir, there’s—”_

“Ah-ah! You’re not off the hook. What’s my name?”

Pause.

_“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t have anything on which to spell it for you.”_

“Don’t mess with the alternate realities, Dopinder. That’s Deadpool 1. This is _What Wicked Webs We un-Weave_." Pause. He whispers, "somebody has an alliteration fetish here." He clears his throat. "Anywho, we’ll see how much outside forces will keep the author from continuing this story. I heard about plans of another space opera AU. What’s my name, Dopinder?”

_“Mr. Wade Wilson.”_

“Mr. Wilson, if you’re nasty. But really, lose the mister. Baby steps. So, what has got your twisties in a knickers? Or is it your knickers in a panties?” He pauses. “Anywho. I hope it’s not Blind Al calling to bitch about her favorite radio show being cancelled because I’ll shoot my brains out if I have to go through that again.”

_“Sir, I don’t think that’s a good idea. We just got back from the cleaning facilities.”_

Wade looks around at the rusty, keeling over ship, taking in all her old, smelly, vintage self and the piles of garbage pushed against the hull.

“Vintage as in Captain America vintage.” He turns back towards the windshield. “Now, my brown, fearless disembodied voice, since you expressed your unwillingness to help a friend in need by cleaning the mess after a _bangover,_ what am I doing here, sitting on this ratty old chair that smells like some disease-ridden hobo slept and pissed his weight in alcohol here?”

They both pause as Spidey figurines interspersed with the Avengers and the X-Men (mainly Wolverine and Colossus) form a uniform blanket of colors as if a unicorn shat sparkles onto the ship’s dashboard which then transformed into comic book Funkos. Not to mention the Deadpool costume hung behind his chair.

**Which he stole from the Deadpool 1 premises.**

_Stop giving away all our secrets!_

**How am I giving away secrets when he displays the damn unwashed rag like it’s a trophy?**

“Let’s forget that for a bit and concentrate on the important stuff. Is Colossus on hold, then? Is he still yapping about joining his boy — three member — band?” He gasps. “Spoiler alert for Deadpool 2: there’s another one joining, and he’s the product of angry, alternate universe, sex between the female counterpart of Professor X only with more hair and sexier curves — don’t let his boyfriend know I said that — and Scottex McLaser.”

_“No, sir, it’s—”_

“Then what is it? You know I’m a busy person, voyaging into the deep, dark, unending, full of wonders — and dangers — space. A guy gotta take care of himself — if you know what I mean.”

_“It’s—”_

“Come on, Dopinder, spill it! Don’t keep papa hanging.”

_“Distress signal, sir.”_

Wade looks at the screen, then at the ceiling, then back at the screen and does a veritable impression of _The Scream._

“Why didn’t you say so sooner?!”

_“I tried sir, but—”_

“On we go, my loyal musketeer, to save a princess from universal terrors!”

The sprawling universe, dotted like a polka dot shawl becomes a very straight Pollock painting as Dopinder speeds towards the distress signal.

**This author is trying too hard. Description was never their forte.**

_Yellow, don’t be a jackass._

**I was** **_born to be wiiiild!_ **

_“Like a true nature’s child~ We were born~ Born to be wild~”_ Deadpool sings. “Come on, Dopinder, sing with me! _We can climb so high, I never wanna die, Born to be will~ Born to be wiiiiild~”_

_“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know that song.”_

“Aw,” — he turns and stage whispers — “party pooper.”

Slowing down, he maneuvers the ship among the mass of travelling meteoroids, some of them hitting the ship and producing sharp _thunks,_ making Wade clench his hands over the steering wheel. It takes him about two minutes to get out of the mine field, and when he does the remnants of a life pod float into space in slow motion.

Wade whistles, the firey light from the M-size Sun to the side of the wreckage create a _chiaroscuro_ play on Wade’s uncovered face. Dopinder pulls up the dashboard scanner and after two tense seconds, it picks up a life form.

“Time to suit up,” he says dramatically and yanks the suit off the hook.

He does the badass walk towards the back of the ship while dressing himself. And promptly falls on his face as he steps down from the last stair.

_“Mr. Pool, are you okay?”_

Wade jumps to his feet, one leg in his suit. “Yeah, yeah. I’m perfectly fine! Just a minor dislocation of my nasal bone, the bridge to my soul. Now you’ll have to go through my mouth to reach my brain.”

Suiting up right where he is takes less than a minute, complete with katanas. He leaves his guns where they are in the garbage piles. Punching the big, red button —

_God save the Queen!_

**There’s no Queen, idiot. She died eons ago.**

_I mean us, jackass. And by us we also include you, you ungrateful peasant._

“For this number I didn’t bring my pink tutu and sparkly tiara, so red and black and tight leather will have to do.”

— the hangar door opens and Wade gets sucked out like in a vacuum. Until he activates his propulsors by hitting one heel with the other.

“I won’t say ‘there’s no place like home’ just because ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore’. At least I don’t have hand propulsors like some red and gold tin man we all know — some of us intimately.” He winks. “Fact is that all kinds of heros, supers, villains and poor science nerds have, at one point in their lives, had boots with in-build propulsors. Like a wet dream. For the science nerds, I mean.”

He rights his direction towards the floating black dot in space.

**Everything is black in space.**

_Space is actually full of light. It’s our eyes that cannot pick up on the light frequency._

***snorts* What eyes? His? I’m amazed he sees anything with that shitty suit on.**

_“Sir, you’re heading in the opposite direction,”_ Dopinder says in his suit comm.

“What? Why didn’t you say so sooner! Show the way, my fast-eating right hand!”

_“I don’t eat, sir. And studies show that eating fast is bad for the stomach and it can cause indigestion because the first digestion is done in your mouth so—”_

“Not if you’re hungry, Dopinder.” He turns his head. “Then you’d eat a cow and have grandma for seconds. Been there, done that.”

_“You ate your grandma, sir?”_

“Oh, Dopinder, we’ve all been there. Grandma’s Perogies’ Chicken Cutlets are to die for!”

 _“I see.”_ Pause. _“Turn left, sir.”_

Wade turns and hits a stray piece of debris.

“Ow! What the shit dinkles?”

 ***cackles* It hit him right in the face! Man, I’d pay money to see that again. On repeat** **_ad infinitum._ **

_But we don’t have money. And we share that face._

**Party pooper!**

“That’s what I said.”

He creates a path among the bits and pieces floating at a higher pace than normal.

“Where’s the princess, Dopinder?”

_“At your 9 o’clock, sir.”_

Wade looks left and right, then up and down. Pulls up his left hand and checks his _Adventure Time_ watch.

“It’s actually 12 o’clock. Unless you go with the Floating Garbage time and that would put us twelve hours behind, so it’s four in the morning… or two. Fuck, math is hard!”

_“Mr. Pool, follow your left, you’re very close.”_

“Why didn’t you say so from the beginning! Dopinder, we really need to work on your direction skills. You could’ve sent me right into this shiny planet, and then no Deadpool for the next comic issue.”

_“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to kill you.”_

“No hard feelings, Dopinder.”

He starts his propulsors again.

_“Mr. Pool, your other left.”_

“Fuck, you’re awful at this, Dopinder!” he says and changes direction once again. “AHA! Princess found.”

He approaches the unconscious victim of the wreckage with caution, keeping an eye out for the pieces of warped metal floating around.

“Here you are, princess,” he says softly, poring over none other than Spider-Man’s mask and unmoving body. “Everything’s gonna be all right, now. Unless you’re dead, then everything’s still gonna be all right, only in a more permanent way.”

“God, you’re talking too much,” Spider-Man quips, a slight clipping at the end. “Who are you?”

Wade smiles like Tom does when he has a diabolical plan and it ends with Jerry dead. Only in this case, there’s nothing diabolic in it. Much.

_Unless you count the seven plus scenarios that just crossed his mind._

**All involving shittier and shittier answers.**

_Hey, he’s trying for all of our sakes, okay? Do you know who this guy is?_

**Do I look like I need to?**

_He’s only the deadliest assassin in this known universe. He could kill you, if you looked at him wrong. There aren’t enough things that could stop him._

**I’m a fucking disembodied box, living in a guy’s head that looks like a gorilla chewed him and spat him into Godzilla’s mouth which then swallowed him and shat him in a toxic waste lake.**

_Ew! You kiss your mother with that mouth?_

**I have no mother!**

“Wow, spoiler alert much?” Wade says to himself. “Let the reader find out on their own.”

“What are you on about?” Spider-Man turns his head towards Wade as he starts to turn around.

Wade catches his biceps (and marvels at the firmness of it) on pure reflex, but Spider-Man’s faster and twists his arm in such a way as to catch Wade’s wrist and have the other hand at his throat, the metal of his blade glinting in the sun.

“I just peed myself a little,” Wade breathes out. “But are you sure you want to off the guy with the propulsors?”

“I can kill you and take off your boots.”

“And they can get you so far— unless your destination is the shiny wrecking ball at your back. Cue the music.”

Dopinder plays Miley Cyrus’ _Wrecking Ball_ directly from Wade’s suit.

“Stop! Stop. Dopinder. It was just a figure of speech.”

 _“Oh, I’m sorry, sir.”_ The music cuts off.

“No hard feelings.” He cocks his head at Spider-Man. “Now, where were we? Oh, right. You were threatening to kill me and rob my boots like a homeless dude on a cold New Yorkian day while I was threatening to leave you without a legacy.”

Spider-Man looks down where a knife is a hair's breadth away from piercing through his suit and hitting his crotch. He turns his head and winks (probably).

“I learned from the best. I’m gonna give you a hint: it’s a rip-off of Winter Soldier and rhymes with ‘able’.” He turns his attention on Spidey again. “So what’s it gonna be, Princess Peach? Do we strike an unlikely partnership where you scratch my back, I scratch your back — maybe without pointy objects in our hands — we go defeat Bowser and then hit it off like in the tropiest trope to have ever troped?”

“God, do you ever stop talking?”

“For an infamous assassin you’re very religious. Is that the same god I know? The one that goes _thou shalt not kill?_ Or is yours morally grey? I’m a Chaotic Neutral kinda person on the Alignment Chart.”

“I could still kill you and steal your ship.”

“Ha! Good plan… only if you can get Dopinder to open the door for you. Which won’t happen if I’m un-alived.”

Spider-Man pauses, but does not relent his hold on Deadpool’s arm.

_Kinda makes a shiver run down my spine._

**Oh, for fuck’s sake! We’re about to lose our heads and you’re getting aroused?**

_So now you do care._

**When it’s that dumb head at stake, I have no other choice.**

_You do realize he can regrow it back, right?_

**Doesn’t mean it won’t hurt like a bitch!**

“I agree with Yellow on this one,” Wade says to himself.

Spider-Man seems to take Wade’s words in stride. Or ignore them completely.

“As if I couldn’t hijack your—” he looks behind Wade at the garishly yellow piece of indented ship “—ship.”

“Hey! That ship has been through a lot. It’s my and Dopinder’s home. He lives there. I’m not gonna let you use that pretentious judgemental tone of voice when you address our home. Do you kiss your momma with that mouth?”

“Mom’s dead.”

Wade gasps, then turns his head. “Textbook villain!” He turns his attention back to Spider-Man. “So lemme guess, your mom was killed when you were little, your dad was never home, so you lived your life as a Sawyer-esque orphan and swore revenge on those who killed her.

Wait for it.

Then you went to live with your estranged Aunt Polly — and lemme guess, you have a brother named Sid who bullied you because you were never close and a cousin named Mary who reminded you of your mom and you always felt connected to her to the point of — whoever’s under fourteen and reading this should close their eyes and skip this part — it becoming a weird, incestuous relationship that you both hid from your aunt and brother.

Wait for it.

But then you discovered that the mastermind behind your mother’s murder was your father all along, and to top it off, when you went to confront and kill him, he actually tried to convince you to become part of his evil plan and help him conquer the universe. But you refused and now are trying to clean the universe of his ilk which technically speaking doesn’t make you a bad guy, but the media loves mystery and since you never explain your reasons, they labeled you as a villain.”

“Or maybe I joined his ‘ilk’ and am now doing his dirty work.”

Wade gasps again. “Plot twist!” He clears his throat. “Then I’ve been cast into the role of the muscly, no-bullshit hero that needs to take you down before you kill more people.”

Spider-Man pauses. The blade at Wade’s throat even relents a bit of the pressure.

“You’re either high as a kite or reading too much weird shit.”

**On the best days it’s both.**

“So what’s it gonna be, Spidey boy? Are we scratching each other’s back or are we gonna stay here until my stomach decides to eat my other organs and then eat itself?”

**If that happens, then I’m gonna eat White.**

_Ew! You don’t even have a mouth, idiot._

**I don’t need a mouth, I can just do this *thunk* and be done with it.**

_Hey! Get the fuck off me!_

**No can do.**

_I’m serious, Yellow. Get off or imma bite you!_

“Guys, calm down. Nobody’s eating anybody. And be quiet, me and Spidey here are about to embark on a journey around the world and become the best of friends.”

“Okay Passerpartout, you can stop right there.”

There’s another gasp from Wade.

_You’re gasping a lot. Are you sure you’re not actually dreaming and your Righty is helping himself to your Junior right now?_

***cackles* I’d high five you for that, White, if I had hands.**

“I’m the Passerpartout to your Willie Fog?”

“Phileas Fog, not the cartoon version.”

 _“You watched the cartoon!”_ His voice couldn’t reach higher notes if Spider-Man were to squeeze his balls right now.

_Imagine that._

**Nope! Just no. Nuh-huh. No. Bleach this box right now!**

“I had a childhood, you know?”

Wade turns his head. “Origin story.”

“So are we gonna keep floating into space, threatening each other or are you gonna take us inside your ship?” He relents the hold on Wade and begins retreating the blade.

“Only if you let me carry you inside bridal style.”

“Not even in your wildest dreams.”

“Oh, baby boy, you’ve no clue how wild my dreams can be. I’m keeping it PG-13 for those who still think this is gonna be the usual funny story where two opposite characters are forced together and sparks begin to fly as soon as the door closes and not of the sexy type.”

There’s a huff from Spider-Man and Wade counts that as a victory.

“Is there any name to go with the mouth on you? Or should I just call you Mr. Red Suit?”

Wade slips the knife back into one of his hidden thigh pockets and slips his hand on the small of his arachnid’s back, grinning when the man doesn’t comment on it. The propulsors fire up and they move towards the ship.

“For the sake of this conversation, I’m gonna keep my mouth shut on the shitload of dirty jokes I could make on that, Spidey, and tell you that you could change the Red Suit to Deadpool — if you’re into safewording, though Deadpool might just tickle my cosplaying kink, so I don’t make any promises that I would stop — but I go by the name of Wade Wilson. Do you have another one beside Spider-Arachnid?”

“They mean the same thing.”

“Shit dinkles. Well, the spider’s out of the bag, now. So?”

He falls silent as the hangar door opens and allows them both inside.

“Just Spider-Man.”

Wade lets him go once they touch ground.

_He’s shorter than us! How cute can that be?_

**Really? Swooning over a deadly assassin when he could twist that spandex-clad perfect hip-to-thigh ass and slit our throats where we’re standing?**

_The only thing I hear there is hypocrisy._

**Eat my shorts.**

Wade snorts a loud laugh.

“Something funny?”

“Just my life. So, Spidey-I-don’t-believe-you-don’t-have-a-real-identity-boy, where to?”

“Nova York.”

“Hear that, Dopinder? It’s back to Floating Garbage. Off we go.”

Pause.

_“Deadpool, sir, you prohibited me from flying the ship.”_

“I did what? Lies! I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Another pause, then a crackling sound, and Wade’s decisively drunken voice filters through.

_“Yer pro-bited to ship this ship, understood? From now, this deep-fried shit is the Cap’n. Say aye, aye, Cap’n.”_

Spidey snorts at his side, then shakes his head.

“Okay, so I did. But you know you shouldn’t listen to a drunkard when he speaks because shit spills out that’s not meant or intended towards you.”

_“Do you mean that, sir? I can ignore your words?”_

“I feel like that’s a trap question,” he whispers. “Like when she goes ‘do you think I’m fat?’ and you sweat your weight in tacos thinking that if you answer too fast she’ll definitely think that you’re lying, but if you answer too slow she’ll know that you think she’s fat.”

Spidey sighs. “Do you have a quiet corner where I can sleep until we reach Nova York?”

“Our favorite Arachnid wants to make a cocoon out of webs to sleep in.”

“I’d rather not. Unless your sleeping quarters are sub-par on the cleaning scale.”

Wade places a hand over his heart, mouth dropping into an o-shape as he watches Spidey make his way towards the middle of the ship.

“‘Quarters’, ‘sub-par’. He’s a man after my heart!”

“I thought I was just a baby boy,” he retorts, turning his upper body _just so_ towards Wade.

And did he push his ass out just a bit?

_Yep. He’s definitely flirting with us._

***groans* The same way a spider flirts with a fly. We’re all gonna die.**

_Oh, shut it, you drama llama. We’re gonna survive. We always do._

**Fuck! It sucks to be us.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had a lot of fun writing the boxes in this fic. I also discovered how freakishly easy it is for me to write Wade.


	2. Chapter 2

Peter wakes up to a lot of noise, most of it coming from under his ear, so when he scrambles up and sticks to the opposite wall, he realizes why. The ship climbs and dips fast, then twirls once, getting Peter’s blood up into his head and then down into his toes. Something hits them and a shouted “ _fuck”_ comes from upstairs, then another dip-and-climb maneuvers and Peter crawls along the wall and out of the small room that’s definitely used for storing the weirdest things like a dirty ceramic toilet and a kimono that is in perfect conditions.

_“Is it still called a windshield if we’re in space? There’s no wind in space.”_

“I don’t know,” Deadpool — or Wade — says exasperatedly, and it’s not because his AI asked, but because he’s concentrated on flying them out of the field of asteroids with minimal damage. “You’re the one with unrestricted access to the dark webs — ha! Pun alert or is it a spoiler? — do some research.” Turns his head. “Something fewer and fewer academics do in-depth. Research your shit.”

He always turns his head when he’s about to say something ridiculous. Or he dips his head and talks as if he’s answering something someone said. There’s definitely something wrong with this guy, but Peter won’t stick enough to find out what.

_“Good morning, Mr. Man. Did you sleep well?”_

“Yeah, I did. Thanks for asking.”

_“No problem, sir.”_

“Hey, Spidey boy. Daddy’s a bit busy right now, so why don’t you — _shitshitshit_ ,” he says as the ship dips violently under a huge asteroid. “Right. We’re still alive.” He swivels in his chair to look at Peter. “You can go make some breakfast. I’d have done that, but as you can see we’re crossing the Bermuda Triangle of the space.”

Peter looks about him. “And the kitchen is—”

“Shit.”

_“We don’t have a kitchen, Mr. Pool.”_

“Right. How about some tacos, Spidey? I know just the right place and it’s in our way.”

“As long as we get to Nova York before six o’clock, I’m game.”

“Oh! What happens at six o’clock.”

“If I tell you—”

“You’re gonna have to kill me? Ha! Many have tried. Zero have succeeded.”

Peter takes the seat next to Wade and takes in the plethora of mini figurines, most of them with him in different versions of his Spider-Man costume, and then there are the Avengers (he had contracts on each one of them, but he refused them; too much hassle, and he needs Tony alive so that he can have someplace where he can _borrow_ the updates for his suit), and several X-Men figurines. Now, he tried to kill Wolverine and Sabertooth in two separate occasions, one stayed dead, the other one — is still a living asshole with long hair and big nose.

“So you can’t die, huh?”

“Oh, you don’t wanna know what happened or what’s underneath this mask.”

“I never asked.”

“So, Mr. Black Spider Assassin, what’s your story?”

Peter groans, letting his head hit the backrest. “I don’t know who they hired to come up with names, but they’re doing a shitty job.”

“That’s what I said!” Wade’s voice comes out chirper and higher. “Sent them a bunch of thousand emails expressing my disagreement with their choice — by the way, a big fan of yours — but the Daily Bugs people never got back to me.”

Peter glances at the figurines. “I can see that.” Then turns his head towards Wade. “That’s because they’re a bunch of assholes who don’t know how to distinguish between a bad name and a good one.”

“Still don’t wanna tell me who you’re going to kill?” He gasps. “Is it the mayor? Oh, come on, Spidey boy, don’t kill that guy. Floating Garbage finally has a dude who doesn’t run it into Hell Garbage Dimension. That city could do with a naive guy like him.”

“I can tell you it’s not the mayor.”

“Phew! You took a mind off my load!”

“Do you always talk like that?”

“You mean in twisted phrases and awesome pop cultural references and jokes to put Lenny Bruce out of his practice to hide my manpain? Why yes, I do.”

_“I can confirm that.”_

“Thank you, Dopinder, but this is a talk between mommy and daddy, so go hide in your room and play questionable dungeon games.”

Peter huffs. Oddly enough, he’s not as put off by the word vomit as he first was, mostly because now he can see the weird sense Wade’s references and jokes make. And it’s good to have someone fill the silence with mindless chatter.

“Why do you wear the suit?”

“Like it? It’s made up of real leather.”

“Isn’t that suffocating when you’re out there?”

“That’s the awesome part of it. It’s the product of the sexy union between 100% pure leather and technology.”

“So it has nanotech incorporated in it. Stark issued?”

“Pah! Questionable origin issued, more like.”

“So how do you keep it updated or repair it when it gets damaged?”

Wade shrugs. “I wash it and then I sew it.”

“You what? That’s not—”

“How it works? Well, probably your suit, but mine is like a second skin, so that’s all it needs to repair itself.”

Peter releases a deep breathe, mind firing a mile a minute. “That’s a self-sustained nanotech suit. Tony would kill to get his hands on the blueprints.”

Wade snorts. “Yeah, right. Toy Boy Tin Can. The good guy. Are we talking about the same person?”

Peter moves his chair left and right, sliding down on it as he looks at the vast, dark space sprawling before them. On a second thought, there’s an approaching mess of lights to the right, most probably what Wade has in mind as a place to eat. The only one Peter can think of is the taqueria _Dos Espacios._

“You’ve no idea how driven he is to further his research. We all know how the artificial intelligence peacekeeping program went.”

“KA-BOOM! With a side of Vision. Yep, it was all over the news. They tried so hard with the movie.”

Peter nods once and falls silent. Surprisingly, Wade respects that and doesn’t fill it with any more gibberish. They dock ten minutes later, and Peter’s suit eyes need to adjust to the flashing lights and glaring neon colors to not get blinded. He stands and takes one step towards the stairs, but stops.

“I don’t think it’d be wise to let people see us together.”

“Aw, you afraid I’m gonna get targeted for being chummy with you? Fear not, my Spidey babe, many have tried to kill me. As you can see, I’m the mutant version of a walkie-talkie gone bad.”

He’d like to argue there, because this guy — no matter how crazy he is — doesn’t deserve to have the hoard of enemies Peter’s made along the years hunt his ass down and maybe torture him to find any scrap of info on Peter, but at the same time he’s hella hungry, so the only thing he can do is change the design of his suit to a nondescript black and have his white eyes grow smaller.

Wade, of course, cracks up laughing.

“A spider-chameleon! Did you just zoom in?” He comes to stand before him and Peter becomes weirdly aware of the size difference between them, which — again — it’s weird because he’s never had this kind of problem, and there were dudes and dudesses taller than Wade. “Am I too close? Do you see the hair in my nose? My brain? The boxes?”

He’s so close that Peter can feel his breath push through two layers now that he’s in an environment filled with oxygen. But that’s not gonna be something that comes out of his mouth of his own volition. He pushes Wade aside easily, and the man gasps.

“Super strength! What else can you do?” He follows him out of the ship. “Can you lift me up with one hand? Can you lift _my_ ship with one hand? Because if you do, that’d be awesome!”

“Wade, shut up.”

It’s not enough that the place feels like it gathered together half of the galaxy into a place that smells of burnt cheese and artificial meat, but then he has to have the chatterbox Wade shout into his ear to cover up from the noise around them.

He lets Wade get their orders as it looks like the queue won’t be finishing three lives from now, and chooses a patch of wall on the other side of the mess hall from which he can see everyone and every exit. There are police patrols, but with the confusion around and the multicolored people milling about he’d need to create a big commotion to have them spot him.

Just when he’s seriously considering giving up on the guy and just take his ship and fly to Nova York, Wade emerges from the crowd with two big bags in both hands.

His spider senses go off and he jumps just as an arrow pierces the wall right where Peter’s head was.

“Whoa! Arrow Guy’s here!” Wade calls out and turns around to look up at the second floor where Hawkeye is perched on the metal banister.

Peter scrambles up on the wall right under the balcony on his side so that Hawkeye can’t have a clear shot of him. How did he find him? He left the prison ship without a radar or means to track him down. Unless — unless somebody hacked into the lifepod right before it got hit by the lone asteroid. The life pod’s shield didn’t withstand that big of an impact so it destroyed half of it and catapulted Peter out into the space.

Another arrow shoots, skimming close to Wade’s ear and pierces the popcorn box and cushion on the cement bench near the little girl. A warning. Hawkeye is not famous for missing his target, and in this case Wade is not his target.

But it’s this arrow and the subsequent wail of the little girl that draws attention towards the area.

 _“Airrow_ Head, that’s just nasty!” Wade says, putting his hands on his hips. “Pick on someone your size.” That’s when he jumps and rolls into a crouch to avoid another arrow and the panic instills in the mass.

Good. Peter can work with chaos. It’s one of his strategies when he needs it. He shoots out a line and flings himself just as Wade jumps up to his feet and shouts, “that’s a waste of taco money, you dipshit. Prepare to be un-alived—” he looks up just as Peter looks down and if it weren’t for their masked faces, Peter would be able to look the man in the eyes “—by Spidey!”

Peter groans. Of course having Wade around is like having a megaphone stuck to your ass announcing your presence or intentions to anybody with two functioning ears. He snorts, considering who’s he gonna fight, and lands on the other end of the banister.

“Superhero landing!” Wade shouts from below.

“I’m not a hero!” Peter shouts back.

“Super landing!”

The sound doesn’t come from the same place it did moments ago, but Peter’s not paying attention to Wade anymore as he runs towards Hawkeye on the banister.

“Hello, Mr. Burp-head!”

“You’re not gonna escape this time, Parker!”

Hawkeye shoots an arrow; Peter easily dodges it, dropping on one leg and using the other to cut Hawkeye’s balance.

He succeeds for a few seconds just to see the Avenger backflip and shoot another arrow while he’s at it. Seriously, the guy uses every twist and turn to his advantage, but that’s how Peter fights, too, so the outcome of this one will be a surprise for the both of them.

Nevermind the fact that Peter’s every punch and kick and flip and somersault is meant to kill. One of them will die tonight and Peter wouldn’t be cross if it were himself.

“Shoot, Barton, don’t out my secret identity like it’s a leak of S.H.I.E.L.D’s top secret files, or I’m gonna have to rat out the address of your little family you think is being kept off the radar.”

He uses his web to take out the bow from Hawkeye’s hand just to have the man use arrows as knives in a show of poorly concealed angry moves, which promptly has Peter take out his own blades after webbing the bow up on the ceiling.

The only mistake he makes is that he doesn’t account for the arrow to release some sort of dust that filters into his mask before the nanotech expelling it. That’s when Hawkeye manages a right cross and a kick to his feet that sees Peter sprawled on the floor into a coughing fit. He rolls to the side when Hawkeye jumps on him, which only brings them to fight on the horizontal side of reality, that damn arrow still firmly gripped in Hawkeye’s left hand and no matter how many lines Peter shoots, he can’t get them to stick to the weapon.

Just when they find themselves at an impasse (both hands and legs twined with the other’s), Peter twists his whole body in such a way as to force Hawkeye to give him an opening and when that happens, he’s fast at disentangling himself from his enemy and jumping on a nearby high surface, which happens to be the backrest of a couch.

Hawkeye is fast, but Peter is faster and he shoots lines from every single angle around Clint until only his head and half of his legs can be seen. He struggles to get out of them, but that’s not gonna happen with the kind of web fluid he made himself.

He drops in front of Hawkeye just as the man hops back, most probably trying to do something to get out of his new outfit.

“Well, that looks like a waste of resources, but don’t worry, you’re worth it.” He’s one step away from the man when he hits the railing and stops.

“Whatever you’re about to do, don’t do it, Parker.”

He cocks his head. “If I push you off this floor, what noise would your body make upon imminent impact?” He places his palm on his forehead. “Let’s find out.”

There’s a gasp from Clint as he topples over the edge, and Peter wonders briefly if it’s because he didn’t expect Peter to actually push him or if he doesn’t like heights that much — which would be counterproductive to the job he has — but a dramatic gasp from below has Peter lean over the edge and see a huge bouncy castle right under the balcony.

It wasn’t there before.

“No, Spidey! Bad Spidey! We don’t kill people in _la taqueria._ Not even deserving ones like Hawkguy here because—” Wade begins his spiel, but Peter tunes out the rest of it as the ammassing law enforcers spill into the place.

He shoots out a line and takes Wade with him on his way. So long, lunch. He’ll have to do the job on an empty stomach and then swing by Aunt May’s house to eat a cooked dinner.

“Tell your AI to be ready for take off as soon as we’re inside,” Peter says as they swing out of the shopping center.

“Dopinder, start the engines. We’re gonna _hasta la vista_ ourselves from here.”

_“But you said that I can’t—”_

“Fuck what I said. Just do it!”

As soon as Peter swings them inside, the ship shoots off even before the hangar door is closed.

“Whoo-hoo! We should do that again! Loved the tarzaning our way out of that sticky situation.”

But Peter is having none of it as his forearm pushes into Wade’s trachea until the man is pressed into the wall.

“Why did you interfere? He’s gonna be on my tail in no time. They’re not the kind of people who give up that easily.”

“What’s it with you and killing everybody that picks a bone with you? Killing is bad. Didn’t momma teach you that?”

“It’s what I’ve done all my life!”

He sucks in a startled breath as soon as the raised words are out and takes a step away from Wade as if he’s been electrocuted, looking down at a random point on the floor. He never meant to lose control so fast, and he never meant to say that. He scrunches up his nose, miffed with himself; training all his life, honing his body into a lethal weapon — all for naught because of one ( **_one_ ** ) inconsequential, deluded man who transports garbage in a ship that looks like it’s running on spit and a prayer.

“Forget what I said.”

He looks at Wade, and for once he’d like to see the man under the mask just so that he could know who to avoid in the future. Not that the red suit doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb. And he seems to prefer being dressed up in that 24/7.

“Sure, toots,” Wade says slowly. “Anything you need.”

“You agreed to take me to Nova York. That’s it. No need to be in each other’s pockets.”

“Sorry, my pockets are full of ammo.”

“Right.”

They stare at each other for a long minute before Peter turns his attention towards the cockpit then in the opposite direction and jumps on a garbage pile, then backflips and lands on a rusty white box that looks a lot like a fridge from W. Bush’s era. There’s nothing else he has to say to Wade, so he sits down and starts to fiddle with his web shooters, calibrating them and checking the amount of web fluid he has left.

Not much. At least, not for what he has in mind, so he procures two small containers from a hidden pocket at his hip and adds them to the compartment.

He realizes too late that Wade’s still there, not far away, staring at his naked hands. It takes Peter staring back for the man to unfreeze and leave. Peter watches him until he takes a seat and takes control of the ship, the silence between them unsettling.

_“Should I play some music, Pool sir?”_

“That won’t be necessary.”

That is jarring, but Peter ignores it in favor of fiddling with his shooters and then using his suit’s interface to check on the information he gathered, checking that there are no changes in the time and place. Technically speaking, nobody placed a contract on this guy, but he’s sure he’s doing everybody a service by taking him out.

And it’s better that nobody put a bounty on his target’s head. That way he doesn’t have competition, and the Avengers won’t know where he’s going to strike. Nowadays they’re becoming better and better at anticipating his next targets and he suspects it has something to do with the contracts assigned to his pseudonym.

Not hard to believe that assassins have such a thing as a database where each one has a list of kills they’ve made ever since they entered the guild. It’s their CV for people that want to hire them. Usually, the contractor specifies if they want the assassination to seem like an accident or if they want it to be obvious or if they don’t care as long as it’s done on time. A high percentage of them want the former one as they hold position of power that would vacillate should anyone tie a murder back to them.

But Peter likes to make it known that it was him who killed this or that once in a while. Usually he gets this urge after particular news about the Avengers being close to catching him — or after they catch one of them because he or she got sloppy and underestimated the ‘good’ guys.

It goes against what the guild stands for, and every time he goes public like this, his share of profits and contracts gets halved. On one particular occasion he was banned from having access to databases or the guild for an entire month. Let’s just say that he used a large portion of his credits to redecorate the entire apartment— walls included.

Everybody in the guild knows that he has a bone to pick with the Avengers on the sole principle that they think that they’re better than Peter — or worse, some of them tried to recruit him, tell him that he can do better than this, that they can help him.

There’s nothing in that universe that ticks him off more than condescension.

A strange noise filters in from the back of the ship which has Peter whip his head in that direction, the x-ray in his eyes scanning the garbage inside and then the structure of the ship. Nothing’s falling apart, but the squealing sort of noise doesn’t relent.

“Whoops! Too close,” Wade calls out.

The ship comes to a sudden halt and Peter has to catch himself on the peeling surface before he topples over, only to have to do that again but on the other side as the ship lurches forward a bit and then stops completely.

“Here we are, Webs, just as promised. Garbage Floating City at your finger-toes.”

Peter hops down and takes a step towards the opening door, but stops. Wade’s several steps away from him, still, waiting.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t freeze your butt over it.” He dips his head again as if he’s listening to something. “Yeah, I know that butt is perfection, stop serenading,” he mutters and Peter wonders briefly if Wade thinks he can’t hear him.

He returns his attention back on Peter as if it’s perfectly normal to look like you have concomitant conversations with— your invisible friend. Oh, well, Peter’s seen worse.

“See ya ‘round, Webs.”

“I don’t think so,” he says. “But thanks for the ride.”

Neither moves, locked in a weird staring down match for enough time to make it seem awkward, but it’s anything but. Then Peter shoots out a line that sticks to a floating lantern and swings himself out of the ship.

 

***

“I must say, Mr. Jameson, you take the Alliteration Nobel Prize.”

Jameson proceeds to spit the mouthful of coffee he just took and jump out of his seat like it was a movie perfect timing. That’s exactly why Peter waited for five, timed minutes stuck to the shadowy corner of the office, just above the open door, to make his grand entrance.

He climbs down from the wall and lands on silent feet right outside the light circle Jameson’s floating desk lamp casts.

“Who are you? How did you get in? Secur—”

Bits of circuitry skid to a halt into the stack of papers right under the lamp.

“I intended to answer your questions in order, but you forced my hand with that last one.” His voice carries on conversational notes. “There’s no security you can alert because they’re all conveniently sleeping. No intern working overtime because you couldn’t care less if they have a social life or not, and no janitor milling about. There’s not a soul between this and the ground floor. Just you and me.”

“What do you want?” No tremor, no fear in his voice, just resignation, and something that sounds a lot like resent.

Huh. So he gets this kind of encounters frequently.

“Nothing you have that I want.”

He plops on the seat in front of the desk, feet on the cushioned seat and ass on the backrest. Now he’s fully into the light, elbows resting on his thighs. He’s modestly satisfied when the man realizes who he’s talking to.

“Maybe your head,” he breathes out, soft and low.

“Who put a bounty on my head?”

“Surprisingly, nobody. But I’m sure you have enough enemies to give someone like me a run for my credits. They’re probably too chicken to put out a contract on you. Or maybe you’re useful to them alive and yapping about this hero and that villain. It’s always black and white with you, isn’t it? People are either evil or good. There’s no in-between.”

He lets that sink in, then he stands abruptly (satisfied that the other man jolts in his seat), jumps down and plops back on the seat, this time sitting sideways on it.

“Would you get an aneurysm if I told you that there are people who’re both? Actually, please get one so that I can watch it unfold.”

Jameson relaxes in his chair. “So you’re here to kill me. No reason.”

“Damn, this chair is super uncomfortable. Do you receive all your guests here? You really should spare some credits on getting new chairs.”

He squirms and turns this way and that way in search for a comfortable position, but he has no luck, so he faces forward and places his crossed feet in-between two uneven stacks of folders and papers. Jameson cocks an eyebrow at that.

“Don’t worry. I’m not that kinda guy. Won’t make a mess of your neat office. Wouldn’t want to make it hard for the next editor-in-chief to pick up the slack after your timely demise.”

“You want me to stop writing about you, is that it?”

Peter twines his fingers behind his head, lulling it left and right as he looks up at the high ceiling, and imitates the sound mainstream shows use for wrong answers.

“Wrong again, Mr. John Jonah Jameson, Jr.”

If Wade were there, he’d have wet himself laughing at that. He stills. Not the path he expected his thoughts to take. Never mind, he’s good at compartmentalizing this kind of stuff.

“Did you know that Jonah was a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, charged by God to go tell the people of Nineveh to repent for their sins or face divine wrath?”

“Are you religious?”

Peter groans as the image of Deadpool when he first opened his eyes comes sailing back.

“You’re the second person to ask me that in a short amount of time.” He springs forward in his seat, which promptly makes Jameson jolt back in his. “I’m just an endless pit of indiscriminate fun facts. Contrary to popular belief, I do have a life outside of this.”

“What life can a scumbag like you have?” Here it comes. Jameson’s face contorts into a mask worthy of Halloween. “Going around killing people for credits like they’re pigs. You’re the worst scum this universe can have, even worse than that knucklehead you killed fifteen hours ago.”

“Juggernaut? He put up quite a fight.”

“So what? Is this some childhood trauma you want to take out on the world at large? Parents killed because they were in the wrong place, wrong time, and you had to watch?

Peter jumps to his feet just as Jameson seems to think that it’s the perfect opportunity to jump for the letter opener (seriously, who even uses that archaic stuff nowadays?), and webs both hands to his armrests.

“And that’s my cue. Was wondering when you’d go dig at my origin story.”

He webs his face from the bridge of his nose down to his chin.

“And FYI, my parents were at the right place, right time. Some missions don’t always go according to plan, but hey, circle of life and all that. Any other origin story you want to share with me?”

Jameson doesn’t cease his struggling and the muffled noises he still makes, eyes wide and full of fear.

“It’s always interesting to find out what others think your past is made up of just to explain your present behavior. No? Nothing else comes to mind? Oh, well, I think you used up all your journalist juice with that last one. It’s sad, but it happens to all of us.”

Maybe he should shut up and do what he came here to do, right? His stomach growls. Right. That might be the best course of action. He crosses his arms and waits, the struggling getting desperate by the second. A minute passes and he starts tapping his foot.

“Did you take scuba diving lessons? Because if you did, this is gonna be long and painful for me.”

His stomach growls again and he sighs.

When Jameson’s body starts to seize, he puts his hands on his hips and gives him another five seconds before— and he’s done. He stills and waits for another two minutes, even though the readings on his suit’s retinas tell him he’s dead.

He cracks his neck twice, turns off the lamp, opens one of the windows close to the ceiling and crawls out. Once on the rooftop, he shoots a line and swings towards Aunt May’s house.


	3. Chapter 3

**Damn, that stinks like seven kinds of hell!**

_ It’s the smell of our hard work. _

“Or just garbage we need to transport to the Dumpster. No biggie.”

**We’re gonna smell like rotten eggs and decaying meat mixed with toilet waste for a week.**

Well, his box isn’t wrong, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s a job. Surprisingly well paying one. Ever since they were forced to move out of Earth, nobody takes trash lightly anymore. Don’t get him wrong, he won’t become rich by doing this, but he won’t scrape to make ends meet either. And honestly, it depends a lot on how much of a load he needs to transport. If it’s big, then the pay is thrice as much as he normally gets. And this one is.

With the credits from this transport he’ll be able to get a thorough ship cleaning and more in-depth repairs (those indents peeled most of the paint off of his ship, and that’s not good for the business, plus he thinks his thrusters need adjustment) as well as buy supplies and maybe buy himself something nice.

_ A butt naked Spidey. _

**Disgusting.**

_ Says the one who waxed poetical over the same butt not too long ago. _

But a naked Spidey wouldn’t be such a waste of money. Maybe he can see if the dark webs have any of that. 

_ Or you could go for the real deal. _

**Har har. Don’t think the ‘real deal’ will be okay with being bought like a piece of meat.**

_ We’re not talking about credits, Yellow. Keep up with the program. _

Really, black nanotech spandex shapes that body so deliciously well that Wade’s surprised he didn’t come on to Spidey more than he already did. Something about his mannerism and way of being makes Wade want to behave (a little) around him. Not much. That would be lazy writing.

But yeah, strive to do better. He now has a reason.

**Yeah. You do your garbage job better than anyone else. Sometimes I think you scare the people you contract with by how punctual and eager you are for the next load.**

_ I have to agree with Yellow on this one. It’s like you need your next fix. _

It pays well. Being punctual is good for business. He heard no complaints so far, so that means that it’s all good.

**You also haven’t heard from your Boy Toy since you played trash taxi for him.**

_ He’s probably busy with his job. _

**Yeah, killing people. That takes a lot of your time.**

_ It actually does. _

**Oh, so now we’re killing machine experts, eh?**

_ Assassin experts. _

Wade sighs and ignores the bickering of his boxes.

_ “Is something the matter, Deadpool sir?” _

“Nothing, Dopinder.”

Dopinder pauses for a long time, and Wade continues his flight towards the Dumpster with outer silence and inner bitching. Damn, those boxes need to learn when to shut the fuck up. He imagines pulling a zipper on them, but that only lasts until he gets distracted by soft, romantic music playing and the boxes shriek their disagreement at being shut up like that at him.

“Dopin—”

_ “I’m sure Mr. Man is okay, sir. He’ll turn up in no time, and you’ll be able to kidnap him for sure this time.” _

“You think I’m moping over—” He laughs suddenly, then turns his head. “He thinks I’m moping over Webs. How stupid can that be? Wait. I never planned on kidnapping him. Where did you get that idea from?”

_ “You told me to do that when I told you about Gita—” _

“That was  _ ages _ ago! I’m a better super now. I do community work. Well paid.”

_ “Yes, sir, you do. I’m very proud of you.” _

“Thank you, Dopinder. That is very nice of you to say.”

_ “And thank you for transfering my conscience to this ship, sir. I’m not sure if I like it or not.” _

“Aw, no biggie. You’ll get used to it in no time.”

_ “It’s been more than twenty years, sir.” _

“Well, you’ll probably have another twenty to decide.”

_ “Did it help, sir?” _

“What?”

_ “The conversation. My scans show me that your dopamine levels have increased. But your serotonin are still on the low. You’ve been having trouble sleeping lately.” _

Wade turns his maskless head. “That’s like performing a physical check up on an unaware subject. Non-con alert!”

But as they pass a fragmented meteoroid, debris from it hits the windshield and activates the wipers— _ he doesn’t have. _ Wade jumps back in his seat. 

“What the shit fuck?!” 

_ “I did some research like you asked, Mr. Pool, and found out that all ships have wipers for when it rains. I only changed their setting from rain activation to anything that hits your window, sir. _ ”

“What the actual fuck, Dopinder!” 

But before he can continue, he sneezes so hard he hits his head on the steering wheel, and when he leans back, three green Wunderbaum wiggle from where they’re suspended on a small hook just above the windshield. Why didn’t he see them there before? Oh, right. He was engaged in deep conversations with his boxes and AI.

“Why are there three artificially smelling Wunder-my-bum in my ship?”

_ “One is Anti-Tobacco— _ ”

“I don’t smoke.”

_ “You did. After your last girlfriend left you. _ ”

“Ah, right where it hurts, Dopinder. Right in the wound that’s freshly-scabbed. Now you opened it and it bleeds like a waterfall. There’s so much blood that I think I’m borrowing some of it from my alter selves. Oh god, I think it filled my lungs and stomach.”

_ “The other one is Eucalyptus. I found many articles saying that Eucalyptus is good for your skin. _ ”

“I’m not gonna rub that stuff on my skin.”

_ “You don’t need to rub it on your skin, Mr. Pool. The smell should help calm you. _ ”

“My skin feels suddenly itchy. I think I may have developed a rash. Dopinder this is all your fault!”

_ “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble for you.” _

Damn, that is just nasty! His AI sounds too repentant for Wade’s own good. It makes him feel like a bully. 

“And I hate bullies. What’s the third one?”

_ “It’s called Ocean Paradise, sir,” _ he chirps. 

“Right.”

He stands, rips them off, goes to the back of the ship, sneezing four times and almost brains himself from their force, pulls out the lid on their only garbage dispenser and throws them out. He passes his index finger under his nose to wipe away the snot and is promptly hit by a chain of sneezes that has him on the floor, gasping for air.

“You’re not allowed to do shopping anymore, Dopinder,” he says, his voice nasal.

They get to the Dumpsters and relieve the load on one of the huge mountains of garbage. Small beings crawl up the side of it to see what the new delivery got them. He looks at them, his ship floating relatively low, and after he sees a jagged smile on one of the beings’ grey face, he hits the red button and the hangar door closes.

He returns to his seat and proceeds to have another heart-attack as a blob of dark mass plops on his windshield which promptly activates the damn wipers just as something in the distance explodes. The fire is blue thanks to his reflective window. There’s a Sun not far away from the Dumpster and he’d very much like to keep his sight intact, thank you very much.

“What the dip-shit-fuck-dinkles!”

_ “Wade, let me in, please!” _ he says, sounding like he’s having trouble breathing as he jumps whenever the wipers pass.

Until the wipers go from lazy mode to an ‘out, damn spot! Out I say!” manner like a certain Lady would say whose name rhymes with regicide, and Spidey is forced to stick his hands and feet on the edges of the windshield where the wipers can’t reach.

“Spidey! Wait. How did he do that? Dopinder, why can I hear him? Didn’t you say space was dead silent? Ha!” Turns his head.  _ “Dead.” _

_ “He broke into my communication program, Pool sir.” _

“What? Why did you let him? Bad Dopinder, we don’t let assassins — even sexy ones clad in nanotech spandex — hijack our communication system.”

_ “Wade, I can hear you. Will you let me in already?” _

_ “He let me borrow his 80s and 90s playlists.” _ The ‘84  _ Ghostbusters  _ theme song filters through the speakers.

The Spider on his windshield starts punching at the bulletproof glass.

**Somebody’s in a hurry.**

_ Maybe he’s come to propose to us. _

**I’m gonna eat my corners if that ever happens.**

Wade puts on his mask before he opens the hangar door and Spider-Man crawls in.

“Whoa! Who chewed  _ you?” _

“Just Doc Ock.”

“The guy with the tentacle porn? You lucky Spidey!”

Spider-Man faints, and if Wade didn’t have super reflexes he’d have gotten intimately acquainted with his dirty floor. His heart skips five heartbeats.

“Whoa, there, baby boy.” 

He stays like that for a while, trying to calm his frantic heartbeat as his arms support Spidey’s upper body and stares at the lolled back head, tempting him.

**Do it.**

_ If you do it, you won’t be able to go back from there. _

**Bullshit. He won’t know.**

_ With the reverse black hole he has instead of a mouth, Spidey will know within the first minute of waking up what he did. _

**Point.**

Wade sighs, shakes his head and allows himself one of the two things he knows he shouldn’t be doing: carries Spidey to the closet below deck bridal style. He doesn’t know what he should do. The Spidey suit is in tatters, and there’s a mop of brown hair peeking from a tear on the side of his head.

Surprisingly, the face area is intact.

“Convenient.”

**We’re in a fic. What did you expect? Instant ID reveal?**

_ Of course things aren’t easy for him in this fic, either. _

**They do so like to torture him.**

_ We do, too. _

**We’re entitled to do that.**

Wade hesitates, hands hovering over Spidey’s torso and stomach, but when they reach the face, Spidey’s arm catches his wrist, groaning.

“Don’t,” he pants and tries to get up.

“Whoa, no, no, baby boy. You’re lying down and healing. I won’t touch your face, you can rest assured.”

Those big, milky eyes fixate on him and, for once, Wade considers pulling his own mask up to show Spidey that he really means it.

“Scouts honor!” he adds, crossing his heart.

A huff and Spidey’s head rolls back. “How old are you? You’re talking about things that Earth had.”

“I was forty, going on fifty when they turned me. Now I’m around five hundred years old.”

A wheezy laugh escapes Spidey and Wade feels lighter than he’s ever been. His attention falls on the hand that’s covering Spidey’s stomach and is one hairbreadth away from touching it, even take it between his scarred ones.

Right.

Maybe not.

“I don’t have any first aid kits around. And if I do, I’m sure it’s an environmental hazard waiting to happen upon breaking the seal, only with less Book of the Dead and more new fashioned plastic wrapper.”

“‘S okay, I heal fast,” he says between breathy notes of laughter. “Just need to… sleep… a bit…”

“Sure thing, baby boy. Sleep away the pain.” He swallows, eyes roving over his Spider, hands clenched on his knees. “Hey, can I touch your hair while you’re sleeping?”

But the deep, even breaths coming from Spidey are enough to make Wade sigh and pull up an old cushion so he can sit more comfortably on the floor.

***snorts* ‘can I touch your hair while you’re sleeping’? Can you be more obvious with your arachnid-shaped crush and creepy tendencies?**

_ We’re sooooo in lurve! Love is in the air~ _

**Actually that’s just decaying meat and rotten eggs.**

_ You’re so unromantic. I wonder why he keeps you around. _

**He needs someone to slam him into the ground. With you around he’d be a bumbling, hopping idiot, making a fool of himself.**

_ And with you around he’d be a moping emo, creeping everyone out with nihilistic sentences. _

**At least I’m a realist!**

_ And at least I help him not be depressed all the time. You’d run him into an early grave before his time. _

**Do you really want me to answer that?**

Wade sighs again and lolls his head back, letting the boxes numb his brain.

_ “Pool sir, are we staying here for much longer?” _

“Nah, you can take us out of here.”

_ “Where to?” _

He looks at Spidey. “Someplace safe.”

_ “Got it, sir.” _

He feels the ship lifting and then turning around and flying away.

“Dopinder?”

_ “Yes, sir?” _

“Keep an eye on him for me. Alert me of any changes.”

_ “He’s healing, sir.” _

“Good.”

He wiggles down on the cushion until the edge of the bed supports his head, crosses his arms and closes his eyes, the quiet hum of the ship and Spidey’s breathing lulling him into a semi-sleep. It’s been a long time.


	4. Chapter 4

There’s no transition between being asleep and awake; one moment he’s floating somewhere and the next he’s wide awake. He doesn’t move, though. Not for lack of wanting, but it takes his body a bit to realize that yes, brain is operative, now _move._

_“Welcome back, Mr. Man.”_

“Just Peter,” he mumbles, then freezes.

There’s no response from the AI, so he dares to hope that he said it low enough to not be heard. Grunting his way up to a sitting position is harder than it sounded in his mind, but when he’s successfully where he wanted himself to be, he freezes again.

Wade’s slouched uncomfortably near his bed, his head lolled away from Peter. His first thought is that the guy is dead, but upon closer inspection, his chest is raising and falling with even breaths. He sighs in relief and then sighs again in resignation at being so concerned with a semi-stranger. Still, after the initial scare goes away, he’s left with an odd warmth in his chest at having the other basically guarding his bed.

Oddly charming.

Yeah, everything about this guy is odd. But not always in a bad way, which is saying something about how Peter perceives people around him. Or at least people who he’s in contact for more than ten minutes. Sometimes even less.

He needs to pee.

Pulling his legs to his chest and twisting out of the bed takes a lot of effort and he prays this is just temporary because he needs his flexibility and agility back ASAP.

“Where’s the bathroom?” he croaks.

_“Up on the main deck and across it.”_

“Thanks,” he murmurs as he tries not to grunt his way up. Much.

_“No problem, sir.”_

When he gets out (and that toilet is not as horrible as he thought it would be considering the state of the ship), Wade is in the pilot’s seat, talking to someone on the comms.

He takes his time stretching his body and finding out where exactly hurts too much to push it and where he can work the soreness in his muscles out like this. Even so, he still feels like an L-class ship ran him over. Repeatedly. When he’s done, and he is as soon as he hears “Wade out”, he sits slowly in the other chair, his suit worn thin by the fact that it had to patch the multiple tears. He wouldn’t be able to survive in open space for more than fifteen minutes, which is far sub-par to the minimum assigned to this specific suit, which is three hours.

“Spidey!” There’s less chirp in that word and more— something else. Not easily decipherable considering the mask that muffles his words. “Good to see you up and walking. Thought you’d sleep till we reached the other end of the galaxy. Not that I have fuel enough for that.”

The corners of his mouth twitch under the mask. He sinks more into the seat and glances sideways at the man.

“Thanks for allowing me in. This is the second time you come to my aid. Is this gonna become a habit?”

He deliberately lets the amusement be heard, and it has the intended effect, Wade huffs a chuckle.

“Only if you keep being stranded by your boyfriends. Those look like unhealthy relationships, baby boy. You need to pick up the people you get physical with more carefully.”

“Oh? Is that so? Any suggestions on how to do that?”

Okay, flirting with this guy had never been in his plan.

“Stop getting so physical?”

“It’s in my job description.”

Seriously, stop.

“Make use of your webs?”

“I’d run out of them before I’d finish the job.”

Oh, he’s going to regret this so much. He can feel it.

“Marry me?”

They both freeze. Peter looks at the dashboard and the many figurines strewn across it, then back at Wade.

“Don’t sweat it, Spidey, I tell that to most people that can keep up with my jokes.” He turns his head. Again. “Shut up.”

Peter doesn’t say anything and a weird silence falls between them. It’s not helpful that he can’t quite get that last statement out of his head now, stuck on repeat like a broken disk. And the more he repeats them, the less light and humorous he feels.

“So, why were you at the Dumpsters?”

A little flash of red appears on the inside of his left retina. The search is done, finally.

“Job.”

“Damn nasty job, then.”

“Well, _someone_ forgot to update the info on this guy and his security detail.”

“Did you finish it?” It’s quieter and more neutral.

“Yes.” He pauses, gauging the other’s uncomfortable shifting. “Don’t tell me that in this day and age you didn’t kill anybody.”

“Killing somebody because you have no other choice and killing them because there’s a hefty price attached to their head are two different things.”

Peter narrows his eyes, miffed at being judged on something he’s done most of his life. He silently pulls up the dark webs and skims through the information that’s pouring in.

“So tell me, how is being ordered to finish off an entire settlement on Cancùn III any better than being paid to off someone?”

The ship screeches to a halt and Peter’s thrown out of his seat and onto the dashboard, throwing the figurines left and right.

“What the hell?” He’s fast to recover, though he winces when the parts of his body that weren’t completely healed go against him.

“Where did you get that information?”

“From the same place classified information is stored.”

“You hacked int—”

A humorless laugh escapes Peter.

“Considering your history in the Special Forces, you’re damn naive for thinking that I wouldn’t go snooping around after you so generously told me your real name. Granted, it took me a week to get to your file. They really wanted you to disappear from their databases.”

Wade stares at him, unmoving from where he’s standing between the two seats. If he decides to punch Peter for his trouble, then Peter won’t have enough space to avoid that, so he moves his weight on both feet and prepares for Wade to go off.

The amount of shit this man pulled off during those ten years is astounding. Near-death situations. Impossible missions. Fire. Suffocation. Fire. Torture. Bombs. Lasers. Caught under a collapsed building. Covert missions deep in enemy territory. Fire. Dishonorably discharged—

What the _fuck?_

“I saved them.”

The quietness of his voice jars Peter and the feed is pushed to the side so that Peter can look at Wade’s masked face.

“Old people, women, children— they didn’t deserve to be killed. Not for sins that they didn’t commit. So I didn’t. Put them on a transport vessel and told them to pick a destination and disappear. Even I wouldn’t be able to track them down considering I disabled the tracking system.”

“They discharged you without honors.”

The mask shifts and if Peter’s seeing it right, Wade’s smirking.

“Yeah, well, when you go against government orders that’s bound to happen.”

“The report says that you killed them in an act of insanity.”

“Which is why I’m here, manning a ship with garbage on it.”

Peter should say something here, maybe apologize for being a jerk or maybe offer some words of some kind. Not comfort. Wade doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would need or appreciate that.

“For what it’s worth, I understand what it's like to be told off.”

Wade snorts a laugh. “Told off. Baby boy—” he takes a step forward which puts their chests a palm away. Peter slowly looks up. “Special Forces was my life. I had friends— well, connections is more appropriate. I could always count on one of them to come and pull my ass out of nasty situations. When you’re out there with your team, every single grudge you hold against your team members disappears, and your only thought is to get everyone back alive. You can’t understand that because you work solo.”

What can Peter say to that? He’s right. He won’t ever be able to understand that. So he breathes out and breathes in, body pulled taut by the incredible tension that’s building up between the two of them.

He knows how strong those arms are and how honed his reflexes are. Wade’s not somebody to be trifled with, no matter how many years have passed since his discharge. He knows death — a file titled Weapon X pulls up and he widens his eyes — more than Peter ever will. Right here and now, he becomes acutely aware of the fact that if he ever receives a contract on Wade, he’s not sure he’d be able to get out alive from it.

“Wade…”

He doesn’t move, although Peter distinctly feels tension radiating from Wade.

“Lemme guess, you got to the best part of my resumè: Weapon X.”

Peter can’t even nod as he reads the file, each sentence more horrifying than the previous one, not even daring to play the videos attached to it. There’s something to be said about Peter Parker if killing somebody by either suffocation or other means of sudden deaths is normal, but what they did to Wade becomes something that shakes Peter to the core.

“Straight out of a comic book, eh?”

But he does the unthinkable and places a big, heavy hand on Peter’s shoulder. His reaction is instantaneous: he catches Wade’s wrist and twists it until he hears a crack, then pulls one of his legs out from under him and flips off the bridge only to jump up on the ceiling, breathing so hard he doesn’t hear anything else but the rush of his blood in his ears for good several seconds.

He doesn’t let Wade out of his sight, slumped uncomfortably between the console and the chair, one hand twisted back awkwardly.

“Dopinder, hyperspace. Now.”

_“Pool, sir?”_

Wade stares at him from where he’s lying down, and Peter’s hands clench on the metal.

“Do as he says.”

There’s no inflection to his voice, as if it only took a bit of scratching under the surface to get to the real Wade Wilson. Even so, the voice carries a coldness to it that sits like lead in Peter’s stomach and he suddenly feels the need for fresh air.

They exit hyperspace two excruciatingly long minutes later. By that time Wade put himself back together and took control of the ship. As soon as they dock on Nova York and the hangar door opens, Peter’s out without a word or a glance backwards.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I mention that Aunt May is BAMF?  
> No?  
> Well, then, enjoy! XD

“Weasley-Parsley!”

“Oh god, not you! What do you want? You promised you wouldn’t call me on pain of death. Are you dying? I hope this time’s for real.”

“Is that any way to talk to your best pal?”

“No, I don’t remember having that. Ever. Who are you?”

“Ha, ha. Nice try. What do you know about Spider-Man?”

“The assassin?”

“No, the friendly neighborhood superhero,” he deadpans.

Weasel rolls his eyes.

“Not much. The guy’s a mystery even for his guild. He takes a wide range of contracts, going from the nastiest to the easiest. He doesn’t seem to have a preference between jackass politicians and good guys. And occasionally goes off the grid and kills somebody without a contract.”

“Tell me something the Space News didn’t already, Weas.”

“I need more time for that. The guild is not a public library, you know. I need to pull some strings.”

“So pull them. Repeatedly, if you need to. And start with the name Peter.”

“What’s with the sudden interest in this guy, anyway? You go radio silence for the past couple of years and now you want information on a ghost.”

“He’s very much real, Weas. I touched him.”

He pauses. Weasel stares at him.

***cackles***

_Oh dear._

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“You do that. Call me when you find something more substantial. Wade out.”

“Oh god, stop quoting Star Trek at me,” Weasel says before the screen goes blank.

He hails a cab from the docking bay and goes to his apartment, which is an entire floor in an abandoned warehouse, half of it full of rusty, defective machines for cutting wood, the other half his humble abode.

It’s been months since he took a break from his job and stayed on solid ground for more than it took him to talk to his contractors while the garbage was loaded onto his ship. He pushes the door shut with his booted foot and then places his data-sheet on the low floating glass surface between the brown couch and the in-built plasma tv.

The data-sheet promptly activates and then the whole place lights up.

“Home sweet, home,” Wade murmurs, and goes into the kitchen.

As he expected, nothing is edible anymore. He falls on the couch face down and groans, too lazy to order take-out or have his shopping be delivered at his door.

_“Pool sir, are you okay?”_

Wade grunts, then stands and goes into his bedroom through a second door. He discards the suit and takes an overdue shower, grateful that the only thing he can count on in this wreck of an apartment is the water pressure and the warm water.

Small mercies.

Surprisingly, his boxes are quiet right now. Probably the silence of the apartment spooked them. Or maybe Wade’s just too tired to be bothered with them. He dries himself gingerly — his scarred skin sensitive after being under warm water for this long — and pulls on a pair of lounge pants, black tee and an off-red zip up hoodie.

“Put something on, Dopinder,” he says as he drops on the comfy couch once again, prepared to let the tv numb his brain.

It opens on the news channel, and really, Wade’s not in the mood for this, but he doesn’t feel like telling Dopinder to change the channel so he stares at the screen unseeing.

What bugs him is, exactly, the arachnid that fled his ship earlier that evening. Fuck, in space it’s night around the clock. There’s no need to distinguish between night and day, when you’re moving around as much as he does.

Maybe if he took permanent residence on the Floating Garbage until some war-like species blew them to smithereens he’d get used to that distinction.

Fuck, this place is so damn depressing.

And Webs had to go an dredge up nasty memories he took up every second of his breathing time to ignore and push deep within the void of his mind. How unfair can the universe be, that the only person he gets to spend time with for more than a dozen of minutes at a time is the one person that manages to turn his carefully construed routine upside down and make him _feel_ all sorts of unwanted things.

Like that fucking mission on Cancùn III. Those scared people. The girl with blue, scaly skin, yellow eyes and red hair. The staring that wouldn’t let up no matter what he did. The insults he received upon his return. How nobody stood up to back him up, even though everyone was on board with his plan.

Life’s unfair.

He grew up with that philosophy basically printed on each brain cell. He just never realized how much of a bitch it can be until that very moment when the Commander discharged him without honors.

Fucking Spider-Man and his hacking abilities.

Fuck his big mouth.

If he had kept it shut. If he hadn’t answered the damn distress signal.

If.

If.

If— he wasn’t already kind of, sort of, maybe, possible, lighty, a little bit smitten with the assassin.

There are a lot of _ifs._

He’s two seconds away from blowing his brains out and take the two hour reprieve it would take him to grow it back.

But he’s tired. Oh. So. Damn. Tired.

He’s been tired from day one of being born, but he still went on and grew up, and now here he is, contemplating his whole life because of _one (1) fucking guy_ whose ass should be blacklisted by the Intergalactic Police.

Because yes, it all started with that ass and it needs to end with it.

Only— it’s not that simple.

No.

Because then _feelings_ happened and he’s once again contemplating the sweet mercy of pulling the trigger for that small reprieve because his brain is driving him crazy with the complicated swerves it does all the while Spidey’s masked face trolling him in the background.

There’s no easy way of putting this.

He fucking _likes_ the guy.

And the last person who he admitted to himself that he liked, and then voiced it out loud, dumped him. Granted, maybe the _I want to fuck you so badly right now_ did not mean the same thing as it meant to Wade. Go figure.

Feelings lost in translation— except without Bill Murray and that girl that looks suspiciously like Black Widow.

He should write a book.

He waits.

No box chirps in with any comment. Suspicious. He’s either cured of them — through a divine intervention that he suspects has to do with Webs — or they simply have nothing to offer. No wit. No sarcasm. No nothing.

Fine. Suit themselves.

He’s just gonna be here, on the couch, brooding by himself.

With Spidey’s butt trolling him.

Of fucking course.

But it’s not just his physical appearance that appeals to him. No. He wouldn’t be going so far as to say that he _likes_ him, if that was the case. It’s something so intrinsically _Spidey_ that Wade is hard pressed to name it. He can’t. It’s unnamable. It’s something that he feels only when he’s around his arachnid. And misses like crazy when he’s alone.

And it’s stupid. He’s been — what — a total amount of two times in his presence?

Wade’s an easy guy _(never pretended otherwise, sweetcheeks)_ so it doesn’t take much for him to fall for someone.

Well, that’s a broad way of putting it.

For someone _that feels right._ Isn’t that what love is all about? Not physical appearance (okay, maybe a little bit— like 5%), but the way the other person makes you feel?

The way Spidey makes him go gooey and soft around the edges because what fucking else—

_“Sir, there’s an incoming call from Mr. Weasel.”_

“Put him on the big screen,” he says, sitting up just as Weasel’s face appears. “What did you find out?”

“I sent you the file. The pics are grainy and most probably old. Somebody went to great pains to delete information about him. Fuck, Wade, he looks like jailbait, although based on his date of birth he must be around 28.”

“Why do you assume that I want something to do with him that’s not strictly out of curiosity?”

“Because you don’t do curiosity lightheartedly and you never express interest in people unless you want something from them or you want to fuck them.”

“All right, fine. I wanna tap that booty.”

“Ugh, gross. I hope you have enough soap to wash that off.”

“Fuck you, Weas.”

“Please don’t.”

“Thanks for the file,” he says, then disconnects and pulls up the file on the data-sheet.

True to Weasel’s word, the pics are so grainy his eyes sting from trying to make out the face in them. And they look like surveillance camera shots, so no full frontal view.

Not important.

He pores over the rest of the information, which, really, is only a page long. But enough to give Wade what he wanted.

“Hello, Peter Parker.”

**Fucking finally! I was two sentences away from hanging myself. So much drama!**

_Yay! We have a name and an address now!_

Well, that solves the ‘mysterious’ disappearance of the boxes.

 

***

“Peter, one of your work friends is here to see you.”

“What? I don’t have any—” He stares at Wade, and Wade drinks in the maskless face, heart skipping several beats. “The hell are you doing here?”

“Peter.”

“Sorry, Aunt May.”

“I almost killed him when he entered through the kitchen window.”

“You did,” Wade coughs, offering the bloody kitchen knife he took from between his ribs back. “I’m just killing-resistant. But I must say, you have one hell of a throw.”

The old lady Peter _Parker_ called ‘Aunt May’ smiles pleasantly as she takes the knife and places it in the kitchen sink. Wade is almost fooled into believing she’s harmless if the flashback to her cold, razor-sharp eyes as she didn’t even need to aim to throw the knife directly at Wade sails back to the fore of his mind.

“I was going for your chest, but you turned just in time to catch it in your ribs. You’re not bad yourself.”

Wade snorts a laugh when he sees Peter gawking at his aunt.

“Aunt May, he broke into your house!”

“Many people do, Peter. That doesn’t mean that they get out alive.”

A chill runs down Wade’s spine at the pleasant smile she offers her nephew, and if he wasn’t used to pleasant faces that hid nasty things, he would’ve stepped back. Probably even fled the place.

“Well, now.” She pats Peter who’s stock still. “Play nice. If you have arguments with each other, take them out of the house.”

She leaves them be as she putters about in the living room. Wade is pretty sure she does that on purpose. Makes noise, that is. Now, in other news—

“What the hell are you doing here?” Peter’s an inch away from his face, his young features contorted into a coiling mass of anger.

“Did you know that your nose scrunches up when you’re angry? I didn’t. You don’t see that kinda detail through a mask—”

The gloveless hands fist into his suit, and Wade’s feeling Peter’s warm puff fan over his chin.

“How did you find me? Why are you here?”

“One question at a time, baby boy.”

“I swear if you don’t tell me right this instant I’m gonna throw you out of the window you crawled through.”

“I actually jumped through it since it was already wide open. Crawling is more your—”

Peter shakes him hard.

**So hard I got stuck to his cerebral cortex.**

_Lucky you. I think I’m in his throat. Ew, what is this? I’m pretty sure one of his amygdalae is stuck to my butt._

**You don’t have an ass.**

_Bitch, I might._

“Okay, okay. No need to get so handsy with this chunk of deformed meat. I’ll tell ya.” Peter relents then, but not before a flash of something like guilt crossing his features. He takes a step back. “I pulled some strings and found out where you live. Or used to. It was under ‘last known address’.”

“Impossible. I cleaned up every record of myself.”

“Baby boy, I might sleep — because this carcass needs some rest every once in a while — but I don’t sleep like the dead. Not like you, _Peter.”_

“You heard it,” he breathes out, taking another step back.

“Clear as a beam.”

“But there are a lot of people called Peter.”

“Not a lot wearing black nanotech spandex with specs strikingly similar to Stark’s latest invention and a degree in Bioengineering who did two internships at Stark labs before falling off the grid entirely.”  

“Stupid,” he murmurs. “Stupid, stupid. I should’ve wiped out his servers. But the backups of their backups’ backups have backups after Ultron.”

“They probably have hard copies, too. Secured somewhere nobody knows. Not even Stark.”

Peter’s gaze latches onto Wade and Wade feels the crackling tension rise once again.

“So why are you here?”

That, Wade didn’t think through.

**Congratulations! You have been awarded the Nobel prize of The Fucking Understatement of the Century! Stand by to receive the bonus.**

He shrugs. “No reason.”

“Bull—” his eyes shift sideways, then back on Wade. “Lies.”

“Really, baby boy. I found out where you live— lived, and just came here to see for myself. Didn’t expect to meet you. Or your aunt. Was expecting a dump of an apartment with malfunctioning heater and ceilings with questionable stains like many fanfics like to present the Spider Cave, but nope, I come here and was promptly killed.”

“I missed,” calls Aunt May from the living room.

“No, you didn’t, Aunt May. I’m just bad at dying,” Wade calls back.

“Stop calling her that. And stop calling me that.”

“Call you what?”

Peter narrows his eyes in warning and Wade sighs as if he’s the one suffering from this conversation.

“Okay, ba— Spidey, untwist your panties. I came here to check things for myself. Nothing more.”

He goes to pat his shoulder (again), but just like last time Peter’s reflexes don’t fail to be up to speed and he catches Wade’s hand, this time pulling him up and twisting his arm behind his back, which forces him to bend forward.

“I don’t believe you,” Peter breathes into his ear and _oh, boy._

_Are we turned on or what?_

“Peter,” Aunt May calls out in warning.

So Peter expels a frustrated sigh and releases Wade— to Wade’s chagrin. He even goes so far as to voice his discontent. Peter sizes him up, frown in place, and doesn’t he look delicious like that? No. Scratch that. He looks like a storm kept at bay, ready to be unleashed on unsuspecting beings.

_We’d like to unleash something else on this unsuspecting baby boy._

***groans* I want to hand in my resignation letter.**

_Shut up, drama llama. You want to kiss him and have your way with him just as much as we do._

**Do I have a choice? I’m a disembodied voice he created to cope up with the shit he’s been through. Like you are.**

_Suit yourself._

He sighs as he rubs the wrist that’s been in a deadlock grip.

“I meant what I said. I really have no other reason for being here. And as you recall, I was in the Special Forces for over a decade. I’m trained in espionage.”

“Yeah, right. That’s why three seconds in and you had a knife stuck in your ribs.”

“Hey, I thought the kitchen was empty, not that she bent down to pick up the knife she dropped that would become intimately acquainted with what’s in-between and behind my ribs.”

“Okay, 007. I can buy that. Still. You being here doesn’t sit well with me.”

Wade stares at Peter for enough time that Peter shifts a bit on his feet.

“I think we went about this the wrong way.” He sticks out a hand, and he’s pleased that Peter doesn’t flinch.

**Or break it.**

_Kinky._

***groans***

“Nice to meet you, Peter Parker. I’m Wade Wilson.”

For the first time since he knows Peter, he smiles. It’s not a full smile, but enough for Wade to realize that yeah, this is the person he’s been looking for. Not actively, no.

“You realize that if I let you live knowing who I am, you’ll have to reveal your face to me sometime soon, right?”

“What, you mean my fucked up face is not all over the files you pulled up from the darkest recesses of the dark webs?”

Peter’s features harden at that.

“Not after Weapon X.”

“There must’ve been videos. The fuckers did so like to tape every little experiment they did.”

If it’s possible, Peter’s face hardens even more. There’s steel in his eyes that Wade’s never seen before. Not for lack of staring at him.

**His ass, you mean.**

“I didn’t— look.” He avoids Wade’s gaze for a couple of seconds. “I respect a mask. Unlike someone I know.”

And there it is. That little smile that reaches his eyes and softens the steel. Wade puts his palms up.

“Hey, in my defense, you weren’t supposed to be here.”

Peter huffs a laugh and shakes his head. And that’s it. It feels like they cleared up something they didn’t know needed to be cleared up.

“Good,” Aunt May chirps from the doorway. “I’m glad you two solved your issues without breaking my kitchen.”

“You’d have our hides before we’d be able to do that,” Peter says.

May chuckles and pats him on the shoulder and only after she goes to the cupboard does Peter relax. Interesting.

“Are you staying for dinner, Wade?” she says as she pulls down plates, and then takes out cutlery. “I made enough for three people. Peter does have a healthy appetite, despite how skinny he is, but I’m sure he’ll share with you.”

Wade glances at Peter who simply rolls his eyes at his aunt and then stares back at Wade, his face carefully blank.

“That is very kind of you, ma’am—”

“Oh, just call me Aunt May. Don’t listen to him.”

Peter sighs, but it’s fond exasperation Wade reads on his face as he goes to help his aunt set the table in the kitchen.

“Right. I’d like to stay, but I have things to do. So.”

Peter cocks an eyebrow at him as May turns around.

“If it’s the ‘things’ Peter needs to do, then they can wait.”

“Oh, no. I don’t kill people for a living.”

And he promptly sucks in a breath, looking wide-eyed at Peter and then at May. Neither blink or change their expectant expressions. Really, what’s he getting into here?  

“Then how did you two meet?”

“We bumped into each other,” he says at the same time as Peter, “he rescued me.”

They pause, then May cocks an eyebrow.

“Looks like you two need to work through a lot of _things._ Are you sure you don’t want to stay for dinner? Last offer.”

There’s roast that Peter takes out of the oven and places on the triangle in the middle of the table. Wade’s mouth waters at the divine smell that wafts over and he’d like nothing more than to stay, but—

But.

“I’m sure. Thanks for the offer, Aunt May. I’d like to kiss your cheek and wish you a good evening, but we only just met over a kitchen knife meant to kill me, so I’d say that we should wait some time and get comfortable with each other before—”

“Wade. Scram.”

Peter’s both amused and stern at the same time and Wade’s awestruck because how can someone pull those contradictory emotions at the same time, but May is chuckling and Peter’s ‘smizing’ one might say if one were Tyra Banks. The eyes that are trained solely on Wade, and Wade needs to _Wade out_ right this instant.

**Lest his mouth vomits more stupid things and embarrasses us all more than he already did.**

“Use the front door next time,” May says as he’s halfway out the window he came through and Wade’s goofy grin stays on all the way to his ship.


	6. Chapter 6

He’s sitting on the couch, pillow in his lap as he unwraps chocolate sphere after chocolate sphere. May is sitting on the armchair nearby, watching the evening news. 

Four days after the ‘unjust’ demise of the editor-in-chief, they’re still going on about his life and what he accomplished, who he was prior to this job, his family and how much they’re all going to miss him. Peter can only roll his eyes at each pompous sentence the news anchors read off of the camera screen. Some of them look like they’re either constipated or are one pretentious word away from bursting out laughing at the ridiculous things that they need to say.

He unwraps another sphere and pops it in his mouth, relishing the way it slowly melts if he keeps it pressed against the roof of his mouth. All that liquid caramel inside that fills his mouth is to die for.

It’s only been 24 hours since Wade’s surprise appearance and he still hasn’t recovered from it. Who would be able to when it’s Wade he’s talking about? No matter what he tries to distract himself with, his thoughts keep replaying the event over and over and over.

The pauses. The words. The way he felt plastered to his front, all those taut muscles, the strength with which he countered Peter’s hand, not giving an inch more than that, not allowing Peter to make it  _ hurt.  _

He shakes his head.

That kind of power is getting to his head.

“If you think harder, you might be able to project your thoughts into the tv,” she says lightly.

Peter huffs and then licks his fingers clean.

“It’s not like I’m used to see people break into your house and get out on their own two feet afterwards.”

She smiles the same smile she gives Peter when she’s in on something he doesn’t know. Or want to.

“Every rule has exceptions, dear.”

“Yeah, I’m the exception to a lot of your rules. Why’s Wade — a stranger might I add — one, too?”

“Because you’re very familiar with him to the point of being friends.”

“Don’t insult me.”

“Peter.”

“Sorry. It— just came out… instinctively.”

May looks at him until it becomes awkward for Peter.

“No matter what a person’s been through or how they look, it’s what they decide to do with their life from this point on that matters. And you know that.”

“Garbage driver.”

May cocks an eyebrow. “And that’s a problem how? It’s an honest job.”

“Too honest of a job,” Peter mutters at the pillow and May chuckles.

“Peter Benjamin Parker, are you afraid you’re not good enough for Wade?”

He stares at the wrappers and May sighs like Peter’s a kid again and he just told her that it’s his fault that his friend at school is sad because he skipped school for three days in a row. Never mind that he was down with the flu. It was his fault he caused such distress to his friend.

She wraps her thin arm around his shoulders and gently drags him until his head rests on her collarbone. The process requires a sacrifice and the pillow topples over between them with the wrappers flying on the floor mostly, as he rearranges his gangly legs to recline on his aunt. 

They stay like that for a while, Peter basking in May’s motherly strokes, the soft, bony fingers running through his hair soothingly.

“I never pretended that what we do is easy, and never taught you the contrary. Yet you still managed to build high walls around your heart. Maybe it’s time you lower them for a while and allow someone other than me in. I won’t be around forever, you know?”

Peter’s arms sneak over her stomach and behind her back and then squeeze just as he squeezes his eyes against the truth in her words. If he keeps both his eyes and May tight enough, maybe the harsh reality will just go away and leave him alone with the only person that understands him — or at least tries to.

“I don’t think Wade’s a good candidate,” he croaks because he’s a petulant little shit. “He’s batshit crazy.”

“And I don’t think you took the time to get to know him or—”

“Did you pay attention to what he blabbered?”

“—looked past what comes out of his mouth,” she continues and Peter grumbles. “Have you tried to let him know more than just an inch of yourself?” 

He grunts. “It’s just…” 

“He pushes all of your buttons.”

Peter purses his lips and looks down at the pillow. He’s not ready to let May go, no matter how uncomfortable the position he’s in is starting to be, so he concentrates on her breathing, her fingers, the deep brown of the pillow basked in the cold white and blue of the tv.

“I think I like him,” he says so softly, that he hopes his aunt doesn’t hear it because it’s the kind of confession he never makes.

“That’s a first.”

Of course there’s a smile in her voice. An inkling feeling tells Peter that she’s been waiting for this. Leave it to his aunt to outwait his stubbornness.

“He might reject me, though.”

“I don’t think that’s ever been an option in his head.”

Peter lifts his head just to throw an incredulous look at his aunt.

“Since when do you read minds?”

She chuckles. “It’s not mind reading, but more of a two and two make four.”

“I’m amazed he resisted in the Special Forces for as much as he did, if you only needed two minutes to figure him out.”

“He’s not an open book, Peter. I’ve encountered a lot of people who behaved similar to him to know the difference between batshit crazy—” Peter gasps “— and those who use the craziness as a coping mechanism. He means well, despite what comes out of his mouth.”

Peter can’t help but cackle at that. “I can’t believe you said ‘batshit crazy’.”

“Now, now, dear. The fact that I don’t tolerate bad language in my house does not mean that I do not know how to use it.”

There’s nothing he can add to that, so he just sighs and nuzzles his cheek against her bony shoulder, tightening his hold on her. She pats the forearm strewn across her stomach.  

“Now, since that’s out of our way, how’s Natasha?”

He opens his eyes a slit. “Beats me. Haven’t seen her since the Ultron debacle. Usually she just leaves when I’m around. I’m either Widow repellent or she simply can’t stand me.”

She pats his forearm. “Good.”

He has no idea what to make of that response, so he elects to ignore it and let himself be lulled into a semi-sleep by fingers, body warmth and the buzz of the tv.

 

***

_ “But you spend money on the human-size rubber chicken! Why can’t I spend money on things to bedeck this ship?” _

“First off,” Wade says, “that rubber chicken is there to prevent dents on this ship when I park it. Second off, what does ‘bedeck’ even mean? And third off, you can’t even  _ smell _ that shit! And fourth off, I’m allergic to it!”

That’s what filters through his sensitive suit as he swings himself towards the freshly-painted yellow ship. It looks like a ladybug with sleek thrusters flanking her generous hips. Or butt.

He actually manages to get in before the hangar door completely shuts down.

_ “‘Bedeck’ is a 1560s word, and means to decorate—” _

“Stop right there with the history lesson. You’re still not allowed to buy—”

“Hello, Wade,” Peter says from where he landed in the middle of the main deck.

Wade doesn’t say anything, fully clad in his red suit. Possibly he never leaves the ship without the mask on, but that might just be Peter’s erroneous assumption. Wade doesn’t move from where his hand still hovers over the red button.

_ “Pool sir, should I take off? We have to pass through the Peanut Belt on our way to Mothra Sixth Base and we need to be back in fifteen hours to pick up the next order.” _

Wade keeps staring at Peter— no,  _ waiting  _ for Peter.

“Oh, I’m good.”

That seems to unfreeze him, and what stood stock still shifts into action, bringing Wade close to Peter. He stands his ground. This much silence from a guy who was so close to talk his ear off is unsettling to say the least.

“Take off, Dopinder,” he says as he stops at Peter’s side. “So, Webs, what brings you to my humble abode?”

Good question. What, indeed.

“No reason in particular.”

Something shifts beneath the mask and if Peter’s not mistaken, Wade’s smiling.

“So revenge.”

“No.”

“Baby boy, don’t tell me you didn’t want to get even for last time. Thought you might catch me without my mask on. Maybe even naked.”

He watches Wade saunter his way up to the pilot’s seat as the ship takes off. Peter has to widen his stance to not fall until the ship rights itself and then joins Wade at the controls.

“Maybe.”

Wade whips his head around so fast Peter’s sure he got whiplash. He grins, but because of the mask, Wade doesn’t see it, so he lets his nanotech dissolve it just under his Adam’s apple.

“Baby boy…” There’s awe and then there’s something else that feels like it’s being kept back, silenced. 

Peter shrugs, hands going for the pockets but meeting only slightly ridged, cool material so his knuckles slide against the sides of his stomach and the top of his thighs, lying there, useless and awkward.

“You already saw my face. Know where I live. Met my aunt. Keeping the mask on seems pointless now.” 

After staring for a long minute at Peter, Wade returns his focus on the starry space outside.

“What if I decide to turn you in to the authorities. Avengers. Leak your information and let your enemies… come for you.”

Peter sinks into the seat as he joins Wade into watching the bland scenery outside.

“Then, for an ex-military guy, you should be ashamed of yourself for telling me beforehand.”

Wade huffs a quiet laugh and Peter smirks. There’s not much to discuss after this, so Peter lets himself be lulled by the quiet thrum of the ship and Wade’s occasional tuneless humming. He wouldn’t go so far as to describe the atmosphere as peaceful, but they’re not far from that.

“So what’s on Mothra Sixth Base apart from settlers and factories?” Peter breaks the silence in indeterminate amount of time later.

“Not to sound like the bad guy here,” — he turns his head with a deadpan look — “but I’m totally gonna sound like a bad guy.” He opens his mouth— 

“You’re gonna have to kill me, if you tell me.”

Wade stares, and Peter can’t help turning the biggest close-mouthed grin he has in his repertoire. He won’t believe that Wade didn’t see that one coming, and besides, he does so like to exaggerate and overreact. Part of his charm, he’s sure, otherwise he wouldn’t be here sharing space and time with a man he himself define as being ‘batshit crazy’.

_ “Approaching the Peanut Belt, Pool sir.” _

“Engage shields.”

_ “Shields up and running.” _

Peter’s hands find the armrests as Wade engages in evasive maneuvers, and just before the ship tumbles a full circle upside down, the seat belt strap him in so he wouldn’t find himself rolling uncontrollably on the ceiling. 

“Why are we taking the Peanut Belt route when Ghidorah Set. Major is the closest between Nova York and Mothra?”

Wade snorts. “Because there are people there who wouldn’t let this beaut pass by just like that.”

“Eventful youth, I take it.”

“Eventful last month, and let’s just leave it at that.”

As soon as they exit the belt, they engage the thrusters and reach Mothra in less than five minutes. Or so it seems to Peter. Maybe it’s because his mind is full of questions he’s burning to ask Wade, which is just a by-product of Wade being  _ so damn silent.  _ He expected him to maintain the chatterbox self on, and thus give Peter something to focus on, maybe even information about him.

Nothing.

It’s frustrating.

Just as he’s gearing up to ask Wade about his Special Forces days, Mothra Sixth Base blinks into existence behind a purple, gaseous planet.

The engineers who built it made it look like four, grey petals (from Tony’s archives they’re made of vibranium) rotating slowly counterclockwise around a bulbous core made of the same metal. One pylon traverses the core from top to bottom, keeping the ring moving at the same distance around the transparent layer of protection to ensure optimal levels of oxygen for those inhabiting the base. From the same archives, it shows how the whole base transforms into a battleship, if need be.

The petals would gather up, serving as protection for what’s constructed on them, gravity shifting to keep them on the petal just as the bulbous core would move out and become the fore of the ship with the ring rotating at a high speed to provide the shield.

Right now it wasn’t under attack, so the petals were completely opened and the ring moving slowly around it.

After being cleared to dock, Peter released the seat belts strapping him in.

“Oh no, Webs, you’re gonna stay here.”

Peter cocked an eyebrow like him. “Why?”

“The… people I’m meeting with are kinda skittish. They don’t know you. Or they do, which might be worse. So I need to do this  _ solo _ . Not like Han Solo, but more like Wade Solo, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t.”

“Engage reflective windshield.”

_ “Reflective windshield engaged.” _

The windshield turns a bit darker, but not obstructing his view of the ships coming in and out or the people walking up and down the walkway. Wade springs out of the chair as soon as the ship is docked and jumps over the three steps.

“Well, I’d still like you to wait for me here. Chat with Dopinder.” He covers the opposite site of his mouth with his left hand. “He’s a gossip,” he whispers.

Peter is standing near his seat, watching as Wade saunters out of the ship, the hangar door closing behind him. He sighs and falls back in his chair, dejected and a lot miffed. Why is he listening to him, though? He makes it a rule not to follow the rules, unless strictly necessary. Or if ignoring them means his life would be in danger.

He might have a fatalistic streak on a bad day, but most of the time he’s good at self-preservation.

This one feels like that.

He crosses his arms over his chest and pouts just as he puts his feet up the dashboard and promptly makes a disaster of the multitude of figurines Wade keeps there. He scrambles to catch all that roll off under his seat and towards the steps, using his webs to snag the ones that are too far for his long (but short) arms.

This warrants another sigh as he stands up with an armful of figurines sticking between themselves and to himself. Wonderful. Now he has an occupation.

_ “Thank you for the playlists, Mr. Man.” _

“It’s Peter,” he replies absentmindedly because getting the web out of figurines is a pain in the ass. Especially with the nooks and crannies and the little arms bent this way, and feet bent that way. “And don’t sweat it. I got tons of other playlists if you wanna listen to them.”

_ “Oh, that would be nice of you, Mr. Peter.” _

Peter sighs again, but he doesn’t correct the AI, mostly because he thinks it’d get an aneurysm trying to call him by his name. Aneurysm might be too humane, though. Program failure. There.

“So, Dopinder,” he begins because he has nobody else to talk to, he’s on a garbage ship on a far-away base, no contract pinging, and he’s doing something that requires a lot of patience but minimal brain focus. “You’ve known Wade for a long time, huh?”

_ “Mr. Pool and I go back to before he was dishonorably discharged.” _

“How long?”

_ “Twenty three years ago.” _

“How did you meet?”

_ “I was his taxi driver for a while. Though he never paid me.” _

Peter snorts, not entirely surprised.

“How did an AI let a customer out of the car without paying their fare?”

_ “Oh, I wasn’t always an Artificial Intelligence.” _

Peter looks up with a mark-me-down-as-curious expression.

“What happened?”

_ “I was helping Mr. Pool escape from some people that were shooting at us when they threw a magnetic grenade that blew our car. Mr. Pool escaped, but I wasn’t so lucky. So he asked Mr. Hawking for help since he found a way to transfer one’s conscience to a computer, and here I am.” _

“Wow, that’s— almost like a fairytale. Minus the romance.”

_ “I was very lucky to have met Mr. Pool. He has taken care of me ever since.” _

“Well, I think you’re a dear friend to him.”

_ “I am? Mr. Pool never said that.” _

Peter chuckles as he finally finishes cleaning up the figurines and placing them back in the group. He’s putting a black, bulky alien with a white spider on the front and a very long tongue out of a wide open mouth, moving to place a very red and blue version of his costume next to the previous figurine when the hangar door opens to admit a singing Wade.

_ “I need a hero~ I’m holding out for a hero till the end of the night~” _ He’s skipping into the ship. “Dopinder, take us out.”

_ “Right away, Mr. Pool.” _

Peter’s standing between the chair with his mini-me in red and blue in one hand, thumb stroking the chest and head, following the dips and rises. The ship rises and turns around at the same time as Wade skips, and when his feet touch the iron grate of the walkway, he promptly falls on his face with a groan.

Peter snorts and shakes his head, but Wade doesn’t rise, doesn’t talk,  _ doesn’t move. _

The Spider-Man figurine doesn’t touch the floor before Peter’s kneeling by his side, turning Wade face up. Wrong move. Wade scrambles to the opposite side and throws up. Peter’s eyes widen.

“What’s wrong, Wade?”

“I don’t—” he retches some more, “— know. Was feeling— perfectly fine— until a moment ago.”

“Wade—” But he’s throwing up again, joints visibly shaking. “Dopinder, scan his body.”

“So kinky, baby boy,” Wade wheezes, trying to stop another onslaught of vomit. “But so not consensual.”

_ “There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Pool. The scans are clean.” _

“Impossible!” Peter crawls to Wade, but he waves an arm blindly behind him to stop Peter. “Wade, something’s very wrong with you. What happened back there?”

“Nothing unusual, baby boy. Talked, threatened, was threatened, shook hands, and on my way. Oh, and ate a chimichanga. They make the best ones here.”

“You stopped to buy food on your way back? What was the fast food called?”

“No fast food.” More retching, followed by heavy breathing. “One of them gave it to me. They know me too well.”

Peter’s about to climb a wall and web Wade to the floor.

“You accepted food from people that threatened you?!”

“I threatened them back.”

Peter curses silently to himself and looks around. “Do you have any meds around here. They surely placed a drug into your food. Maybe a stomach bug or some other virus that attacks your immune—”

Wade chuckles humorlessly. “It’s a drug, alright. Just not the kind you think.”

“What?”

“I’m immortal, baby boy. Nothing can kill me.” Peter looks dubiously at him, and Wade drags his body to rest against the hull. “Was diagnosed with cancer around seventeen. Got into the program you dug up. They promised a cure and ended up fucking me up irreversibly. Believe me, I tried to get them to fix me. This— whatever they put in that chimichanga is potent enough to stop my healing factor from keeping the cancer at bay.”

“Wha— what does that mean?”

A weak smile. “I’m dying, baby boy. And if Dopinder’s scans didn’t pick up anything, then it means it’s untraceable.” He coughs and hunches forward a bit. “Nobody can save me.”

“We’re going back,” Peter says and it’s both indignation and desperation. “I’m gonna torture them until they spill out where the antidote is. No drug exists without an antidote.”

Wade chuckles which turns rapidly into horrendous coughs and blood running down the side of his mouth.

“They don’t have it.”

“You don’t know that. Dopinder, reverse course. We’re going back.”

“Dopinder—” Cough. “Keep your course.”

_ “Yes, Mr. Pool. But Mr. Peter is right. You don’t look well. Should I plot a course for the nearest hosp—” _

“Keep the course.”

“Wade! You need medical attention.”

Another wheezy chuckle, one hand on his stomach, the other keeping his upper body from falling to one side.

“I don’t.” His voice is feeble, mostly mumbled. “Nobody can save me. My only regret is that I didn’t get to know you better. Baby boy, I was never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you. Funny things happen in my chest when you smile. Wanted to find out why—”

“Wade!”

He’s right there, catching Wade before he falls on the floor, rearranging the limp body in such a way as to have his head in his lap. The mask covers his head again and a contact list appears on the right retina. He scrolls with his eyes through it, looking for a specific name, and when he finds it, he blinks twice and the call goes out, his mask dissolving.   __

“Hey, Mr. Strange.”

“You’re calling in the favor,” he says without preamble, because he’s the Sorcerer Supreme and he knows what you’re going to say before you say it— or think it.

“I knew you were my friend for a reason.”

“Barely acquaintance. So what do you need?”

“Help.”

“Obviously. What kind?”

“Wade. He’s— he’s not feeling well. I don’t know what happened, but he’s retching blood and looking like Death’s gonna take him any moment now.”

“Wrong universe, baby boy,” Wade mumbles, but he’s still out of it.

Doctor Strange disconnects, but soon after a portal sizzles in the middle of the walkway and the sparkling gold widens until the circle connects with the floor.

“Is it Christmas, already?” Wade babbles, and he can’t make out if his eyes are open or not because of the mask. “I thought we’d need a chimney for Santa to slide in.”

Peter chuckles nervously, his gloveless hand gingerly stroking Wade’s masked head. “It’s gonna have to be a magic portal, Wade. Easier for Santa to come in.”

Wade huffs a weak laugh and Doctor Strange walks up to them, the portal closing behind him.

“Dopinder scanned him,” he tells Strange, “but he found nothing wrong, yet he’s getting worse by the second.”

Strange passes his golden symbols encased hand over Wade, closing his eyes for a few moments.

“There’s something in his bloodstream. Almost untraceable and not man made. I’ll need to have him at the castle where I can perform extensive spells.”

“Baby boy, your face,” Wade butts in.

“Hm?” He blinks down at the man in his lap. “Oh, he already knows who I am.”

Wade coughs. “So I’m in the VIP club now. Kinda jealous I got to the party so late. He’s got exclusive photos and autographs from you, I’m sure. Might you sign my forehead? He doesn’t look like someone who’d do that. I promise I won’t wash that for the years to—”

He falls silent and limp in his arms, and Peter glances apprehensively at Doctor Strange as he passes his hands above Wade’s body.

“Is he getting worse?”

“No. He was talking too much.” He turns and keeps one arm with the glowy inscriptions at chest level while the other one draws a visible circle towards a room cast in moonlight. “Now, if you don’t mind, we’ll go to my castle.”

Peter nods, heart beating a mile a minute and lets Strange use magic to make Wade float at hip level.

“Dopinder, do you have cloaking?”

_ “I do, Mr. Man. Is Mr. Pool going to be okay?” _

Peter nods. “He will be. Engage cloaking and block tracking. We’ll come back as soon as Wade’s out of danger.”

_ “Okay, Mr. Man. Take care of Mr. Pool for me.” _

“I will.”

Peter follows Strange and Wade through the portal not before hearing Dopinder say,  _ “all non-essential systems are on standby.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: remember the "that rubber chicken is there to prevent dents on this ship"? Well, that "dent" was originally "indentures" because I was so sure it meant what dents mean that when Noir pointed it out and then I went to check it, I laughed my heart out at how wrong I was.
> 
> So yes, I am grateful to my beta for point out that rubber chicken preventing "a legal contract that reflects or covers a debt or purchase obligation" on Wade's ship was not exactly what I was going for. XD


	7. Chapter 7

“Sticking to the corner of the room in your full costume won’t speed the recovery.”

There are thousands of spells his eyes peruse, old and new, from this plane of existence and from the dead, from this reality and from multiple others. The books float around his head as his hands remain splayed above the unconscious victim of an unknown drug, keeping his vitals stable but at a low rate.

He had to magic away the ugly red suit to have the green-blue smoke be absorbed by his body faster so that he could keep the drug spreading at a minimum. Parker refused to let him have the mask removed as well, so there’s a masked, naked man frozen in time and space.

“You’ve been running spells,” — Peter Parker begins, indignation and the fiery impatience of a man who still hasn’t lost contact with his teenage rebellious phase clogging his words — “and making objects appear through your mini-portals for the past five hours.”

Another spell— another failure. Too weak. The drug decomposed faster than any they have come into contact with and attacked his immune system first, stopping its functionality then started spreading around, attacking other organs, through his blood.

“You must understand,” — his patience is running thin, and that’s saying something about a sorcerer who learned how to have that in spades — “that whatever they gave him it’s in his bloodstream. That means that it attached itself to the individual cells. I managed to stop them spreading, but that also means that he's in a non-existing phase.”

“What does that mean?”

“His whole body is frozen in time, giving _me_ time to find the least hurtful spell and potion.”

He doesn’t even glances at Peter Parker as he approaches. There’s no need to because right now this man is turning into a very annoying fly, one Strange will swat within the next moment if he continues with the nagging.

“Can’t you fast-forward to the point in time where you find what you’re looking for? You have the Time Stone at your fingertips.”

This warrants Strange interrupting his search to turn his best I’ll-pretend-I-didn’t-hear-that expression.

“It’s not a free ticket to abuse that kind of power.”

He met Peter Parker— or Spider-Man not long ago by space-time standards. Just a blink of an eye. But long ago by any other planet’s standards. He would collocate the meeting in years.

“I know that with great power comes great responsibility, but your responsibility lies— floats unconscious and you’re standing there reading through your books like you’re looking for a food recipe!”

Strange makes a zip it motion with his hand and Parker promptly loses his voice. He leafs through the book he was consulting prior to acknowledging the assassin’s presence and Parker simply sighs and crosses his arms, tapping his foot.

“Next I’ll have you float around in the Biollante Pentagon, if you don’t stop making a nuisance of yourself. And there’s no light in that zone for your Stark issued suit to convert into oxygen,” he says almost absentmindedly before he recites the paragraph-long spell under his breath.

The tapping stops.

He knew about the existence of the Guild from its inception, and even expected to have someone, at some point, put a contract on his head. He has a lot of enemies both in this reality and in others, and he wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of them would come after him through third parties.

What he never expected was to get a call from Spider-Man, notorious assassin with the most kills under his belt, warning him of a contract. He didn’t get the particulars of the situation at the time, but later on he discovered that Spider-Man had gone against the Guild and called out the contract for being placed under false accusations. The kid had dug up and found who the contractor was and who pulled the contractor’s strings, something that was forbidden in the Guild.

His arguments held, but by that time Strange already eliminated the assassin sent for him.

There is such a thing as rules that the Guild follows, and having immortal entities using mortals to do their bidding is something that the Guild does not condone.

As they say, long story short: he ended up owing Spider-Man a favor.

A favor that he’s using now on— a scarred guy. There’s a story there which he can only gauge from the assassin’s reactions and behavior, but he’s not interested enough in Peter Parker’s life to want to find out. Ignorance is bliss, after all. But only in this situation.

It takes him a while after zipping Parker’s mouth shut to have a spell of dubious origins, that he ignored every time it passed under his eyes, return.

He might not care about the relationship between Parker and this man, but he cares enough about human beings to be careful what spells he uses on them.

Without other options left, he embarks on reading the spell in his mind to try and understand it with his mind’s eye, and then murmur it just a tad lower than he did the other spells so that it results in a guttural thrum.

It takes him a millisecond to realize that the spell draws power from the particular space that’s created (and which he’s being forced into) between his astral plane and his physical one.

“Strange, what’s happening? You’re glowing and transparent.”

He ignores Parker, concentrated as he is on the spell, and he finds himself sinking his astral hands into the man’s stomach and chest, feeling a strange kind of warmth and then a marrow-deep cold that almost repels Strange if he didn’t plow on with the kind of stubborn determination he pestered the Ancient One when he had exhausted his options at curing his damaged hands.

A very long time ago.

He latches onto individual cells and begins to burn out the drug, an echo of a familiar feeling pervading the astral plane, as if somebody’s encumbering at the edges of the space-time continuum.

With a gasp he draws back, not before his astral self’s voice reverberates through space and time.

_“We meet again, Dormammu.”_

“It’s done,” he says from where he’s sprawled on the floor.

Parker’s reflexes catch the scarred man before he touches the ground as the spells keeping him in place and frozen in time disappear.

“Is he okay?” He can’t seem to know who to stare at, Strange or the man in his arms.

He pushes himself up and rearranges his clothes back in place.

“He is. Now he only needs to sleep because the spell I used drew power from his soul, too. You’re both welcome to stay here until he wakes up.” Parker gears up to say something, but he puts a hand up. “I recommend he stays here, as this castle is imbued with magic. Magic that will help speed up his recovery.”

He doesn’t wait for Parker to nod, changing the room they’re in to one that has a large bed, lush rugs, and a high window through which the moon basks half the bed in its light.

“There’s food and water.” He indicates the table near the bed. “If you need me, just call.”

There’s nothing else he can do or _will_ do, so he leaves them be. He has bigger matters to attend to now that Dormammu insinuated this reality once again.

No rest for the wicked.

 

***

The smell of melted cheese brings him back to a state where he’s conscious of his surroundings, but not awake enough to open his eyes.

He feels groggy and tired, but at peace with his mind, which is a first. No box comments or pesters him. There’s blessed quiet in his head. He can’t say as much about what lies beyond his eyelids. Movement, someone breathing, clinks. His first instinct is to not move and wait to see how the situation develops, but the sneeze takes him (and probably the other person) by surprise.

He succumbs to it like a fish to bait, if said fish knew about the purpose of the bait but couldn’t help itself not biting it.

The other occupant of the room stills and Wade does too, mostly because sneezing inside a mask is so not something you’d want to do. Under any circumstances. But surprise sneezes help you reach heights of gross you never knew you could reach.

“Wade?” It’s whispered and hopeful and Wade would recognize that pitched voice anywhere and through any distorting devices.

“The one and only.”

“Thank whatever deity’s out there!”

“Uh-oh, again with the religion. Are you sure you’re not secretly part of a cult? The really nasty, ex-American ones? The ones that—”

A hand on his (bare!) shoulder cuts him off.

“How are you feeling?”

He scrunches up his nose. Wrong. Oh, _so wrong._ He just grossed himself out, and that’s something coming from someone who’s a walking disaster and used to see disgusting things. Or people. And he’s not referring to their physical appearance.

“Would feel better without the mask. On second thought, you don’t wanna see what’s under the mask. Am I naked under the covers, baby boy?”

Peter hesitates. “Strange removed your suit—”

“I feel violated.”

“But I didn’t let him take off your mask.”

Now that’s something Wade didn’t expect. He thought it might have been this Strange guy seeing his ugly mug and choosing to keep it hidden. Peter’s eyes roam over his face, no doubt wishing he could read Wade’s expression and have that guide him.

“Well,” he clears his throat. “I meant what I said. You don’t wanna see what’s behind this mask.”

“Wade, it’s okay.” Wade drew in a breath, knowing what was coming next. “You can keep the mask on, I don’t mind.” And promptly deflates.

That’s not what he expected.

“That’s so sweet of you to respect my boundaries, but I just sneezed in this thing. Think I might have eaten some of the stuff that came out of my nose.”

Peter blinks. “Okay. Do you want me to— or?”

Even as he speaks, Wade’s hands are already grabbing the hem of his mask. He stops, eying the hovering hands as they retreat back on Peter’s thighs.

**ARE YOU SERIOUSLY GONNA STOP HIM FROM TOUCHING YOU? HAS YOUR BRAIN FINALLY DECOMPOSED?!**

_Okay, folks! Show’s over! We’re still here. Still nagging and bitching at this piece of work. You can go home now._

He tries not to blow air too much, letting his hands fall as he sits up.

“Go ahead,” he says quietly.

Once again, Peter hesitates, but not for long as his fingers slowly roll up the material.

“Careful of the gross stuff,” Wade says as the mask reveals his mouth and then nose, and Peter stops. “Too much at once. I know.”

He goes to roll the mask back and deal with the snot until he’s alone, but Peter catches his wrist and it’s a warm and smooth vise. Wade doesn’t move, so Peter lets him go and continues pushing the material up until it’s completely off and Wade stares back at the Spidey behind the Spidey.

“I kinda need a wet something to clean the—”

A small bucket with a white cloth appears on the bedside table, and Peter, without missing a beat, goes to take it and bring it between them. With slow motions, he wrings the cloth and then passes it over his cheek, mouth, nose, the other cheek. It smells of something sweet, but subtle. And the cloth is warm.

It’s been ages since his skin was treated to something more than perfunctory strokes or rough and fast handling.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You almost died.”

“I can handle washing my own face.”

“I know.”

Yet he doesn’t stop wetting and wringing the cloth only to have it pass all over his face. It’s unsettling. This care. Peter. Peter’s serene face. The focus he reserves to his ugly mug. Is this his reality? What gives?

“You didn’t like me. What changed? I mean, I know that it’s awesome having a crazy guy as an occasional conversation partner because it makes for easy conversation where you just let the crazy guy ramble on and on but—”

“What makes you think that I didn’t like you?”

“The huff and puff?”

Peter huffs. “I don’t huff and puff.”

“Point. You only huff.”

He rolls his eyes and Wade keeps at bay the smirk, though Peter shakes his head as he drowns the rag (yeah, with a mug like his, any cloth becomes a rag after being used anywhere on his skin)—

**Oh, for fuck’s sake! Shut the drama. I wanna see what happens next.**

“I never disliked you, Wade,” he says, looking down at the bucket, and Wade suspects that he’s also avoiding looking at Wade’s naked chest. “Okay, maybe a little in the beginning, but you can’t expect a half-dead man to not have a short fuse when his rescuer talks his ear off and not, actually, rescues him.”

“That’s my charm, baby boy. I talk people’s ears off to prevent them from hearing the real crazy that lies beneath it.”

Peter meets his gaze, confusion maring his young features. His skin doesn’t hurt when he smirks. Huh. Magic water goes a long way. It’s coming with him when he leaves.

“I don’t mind, you talking a lot. Not anymore.”

There’s nothing Wade can say to that. It’s Peter’s decision and choice, so Wade looks down to find that the bucket has disappeared. Well, shit-biscuits.

“Where are we? And how long was I out?”

“We’re in Stephen Strange’s castle, and you were out for almost half a day.”

“Must be why I feel so well-rested.”

“Well, you were cryogenized for about six hours.”

“Naked?”

Peter nods.

Wade turns his head. “Non-con alert!” But he returns his attention on Peter when he chuckles.

“Nobody touched you… well, Strange did an astral thing where he had his ghost hands in your chest and stomach, but that’s about it.”

Wade shivers. “Kinky.”

Peter shakes his head. “Hungry? There’s pretty much whatever you want to eat. Just say the dish and it’ll appear.”

Wade’s eyes slide towards the bedside table and then back on his Spidey, more accurately on his lips.

**I don’t think Webs’ on the menu.**

_Shh! He’s on the Special Menu._

“No, I’m fine. But you can go ahead, baby boy. I interrupted you when I woke up.”

Peter narrows his eyes. “What’s with the ‘baby boy’? It’s the single most used pet name out of the many others I heard you say.”

“You’re baby faced.”

“I’m 28.”

“So young.”

“You don’t look that much older.”

“I’m 40, going on 41. Too old, I’d say.”

Peter smirks and Wade drinks that sight in like he inhales chimichangas when he’s famished.

“Better than five hundred years old.”

**SHOTS FIRED!**

_Please apply Enceladus to the burn._

**What era are you from? We left that galaxy eons ago.**

_Half a century ago. Not that long._

Wade’s getting better at ignoring the boxes when he’s shocked into laughing, joined by his Spidey. Unexpected things keep pouring down and they all come from his baby boy. Was he this fun to talk to? He doesn’t remember. A laugh here or there (feeling like it surprised Peter, too), but mostly distance. That’s what he perceived from Webs.

That didn’t seem to have deterred his broken brain to take a liking on him. Or heart. Whichever stumbled and fell on its face.

“We probably should go,” Wade says after a while, leaning back, doing something with the covers that’s both pushing them off and pulling them up. “Dopinder’s worried sick by now. That’s how he’s made. I’ll need my—”

His red suit appears near his legs. He drags it up. Smells like laundry detergent. Who even uses that in this space and time? Oh yeah, everybody but him. He makes to scoot off the bed and then take on his suit, mentally preparing himself to flash his Spidey, when Peter catches his forearm and in one fluid move drags him effortlessly towards him, kissing Wade like it’s goodbye.

Wade stills completely, the shock making his brain short-circuit as his whole attention zooms in to the way Peter’s lips feel against his. Not that there’s much feeling in them, what with the scars, and if he could just press a li’l bit more—

Peter pushes back, lips shaped like an apology and Wade follows up, pressing their lips together once again, this time harder, swallowing whatever apology he might have wanted to say. He tastes like cheese and salmon salad. Garlic. Well, he licks the flavors clean, relishing in the biting feeling of the garlic. His own mouth must taste like grave robbery gone bad, but he doesn’t hear his baby boy complaining.

Probably the garlic keeps the decaying taste at bay.

They break the kiss when the oxygen gets on the low side, and Wade’s brain is floating in a puddle of grey matter goo.

“Why did you do that?” he whispers breathlessly.

“You need to stop asking me that and instead ask me why I’m stopping.”

“I’ll do that in a bit. After you answer.”

Peter shrugs, glancing sideways only to return his attention to Wade’s lips.

“I felt like I should do that. Before there’s too much distance and no easy way to bridge it. Tell you without telling you that I don’t just tolerate you, but I like to spend time in your company.”

“You—”

“If you’ve finished exploring the depths of your love for each other,” Wong interrupts. “Master Strange will see you to your ship.” There’s no outward change to his chubby face, but Wade’s still miffed by being cock-blocked so rudely. “I fear that if we leave him and your ship’s AI for too long, your AI might fall into an existential crisis. And I believe it is an important element of your ship.”

Wade groans, but does scoot over this time to take on his suit.

“Thanks for the cock-blocking, Benedict Wong.”

Wong blinks and looks at Peter.

“I mean, he’s not _wong.”_

Wade cackles so much his voice finds the evil cackle frequency as he finishes fussing over the suit. He thumbs up Peter for the A+ pun while the man closes his eyes as if regretting that Wade’s humor successfully rubbed off on him.

But joke’s on Wong. And Wade. Nobody is blessed and cursed with the ability to break the fourth wall and know what’s what beyond the multi-reality stint.


	8. Chapter 8

_“Welcome back, Mr. Pool, Mr. Peter.”_

Both of their mouths are too busy to do more than mumble something as they continue devouring each other.

“Dopinder,” Wade pants, Peter’s hands massaging his scalp in a decisively not relaxing way, “tune off for the next half hour.”

“Half hour sounds like a bit too preposterous.”

Wade turns his head. “Ha, he said preposterous. Imma ravish my arachnid.”

“Only if this arachnid doesn’t ravish you first.”

“So corny,” Wade whispers, kissing Peter for his effort.

They grind against each other, mouths glued together because Peter has waited enough to do this. And maybe they should slow down and take one step at a time. Maybe become best friends. No. Not when Wade’s palming him through the suit and the suit obligingly retreats. Peter hisses and Wade mumbles a half apology as he takes off the gloves and throws them somewhere.

“I need somethin’— too dry—”

Peter takes one of his hands and pushes Wade back with the other. Locking gazes, he licks Wade’s palm and then fingers, scrunching up his nose at the salty and leather taste.

“Sorry, baby boy.”

But then they’re kissing again and Wade’s wet hand returns to stroke Peter and he moans and groans, hips half-thrusting up, but Wade possesses enough muscles and inhuman strength to pin them against the hull. And if that doesn’t turn Peter on even more, then he doesn’t know what will.

He plays with Peter, the pressure letting up and down randomly, and he does it so well that Peter’s starting to beg him, which in turn has Wade groan into his mouth. Then, just as fast as their mouths latched onto each other, Wade’s kneeling before him, and replacing his hand with his mouth. Peter’s body goes rigid as he tries to not come right there and then.

He wants to savor this. Let _Wade_ savor this.

It’s hard for Peter to not look down and moan more lewdly at the debauched image Wade makes, lips shiny with spit and pre-come, eyelids half-closed, every now and then he changes the position and his tongue peeks teasing Peter’s length.

So maddening, yet so good. He doesn’t even realize that he’s on the cusp of climaxing since he’s so concentrated on the picture that’s burned on the back of his eyelids and the way Wade’s mouth feels on his cock. There’s no shout or moan, just a silent cry, mouth in an imperfect o-shape.

“Sorry, should’ve warned,” he slurs slightly, looking down at a man who’s still lapping at Peter’s cock. “My turn now.” Wade just hums and Peter shivers as it reverberates through his now sensitive dick.

_“Mr. Pool sir?”_

“Busy, Dopinder,” he says, but it doesn’t sound as coherent as words without a dick in one’s mouth would sound.

_“Yes, but—”_

Wade puts a finger up, making more and more obscene sounds. Peter’s starting to push at Wade’s shoulders.

_“Sir—”_

He waggles the finger. Peter sighs. Typical Wade. But his dick is still in his mouth and it’s way past being comfortable.

“Wade—”

_“Someone broke into your apartment.”_

“What?!”

It’s instantaneous. He drags his lips so fast that Peter’s moan comes like a tardy student on his first day of uni. The suit covers his groin just as Wade jumps to his feet and then towards the cockpit.

_“My sensors alerted me of unauthorized movement in your apartment and then someone shot one of the hidden cameras.”_

“Put it on the feed.”

A guy that looks decisively military appears on the screen, one metal arm keeping a machine gun pointed at the camera before the feed cuts off.

“You motherfucker, shit-eating, groveling son of a bitch!”

“That’s a lot of names for a guy who looks—” he searches for the right words, “— like the next Terminator, but improved.”

“Douchebag’s name’s Cable.” He turns his head. “Josh Brolin did an amazing job playing him. So much DC darkness and drama. Totes recommend you watch Infinity War. More drama, less darkness.”

“What’s he doing in your home?”

“I’m about to find out.”

He rummages through the garbage bags strewn on each side of the iron catwalk and emerges with two swords which he sheathes at his back, then dives into another pile of garbage bags and fishes small, ankle guns, then knives, grenades, more guns.

Peter’s watching the whole thing from the catwalk, waiting for Wade to finish arming himself. When he’s done, he jumps up near Peter.

“You don’t need to come if—”

Peter puts up a hand and shakes his head.

“We’re not going to even attempt having that talk.”

Wade shrugs. “Okay.” And then leaves.

“Where are you going?”

“To get into our means of transportation.”

Peter’s mask covers his face as he follows Wade out of the ship.

“I can swing us there, you know.”

“Oh no, baby boy, for this special, uninvited guest I want him to know I’m coming.”

That’s not how Peter usually does his missions, but then again, this is not his mission, so he’ll defer to Wade. He looks like he knows this ‘guest’. But then a yellow, hover-car is pushed out of the side of the ship and Peter’s eyes widen.

“Is this a taxi?”

Wade’s the first to jump in, and Peter reluctantly follows, not before he stares at the hover-car as much as possible. The interior doesn’t look like it changed to modern models. Even the smell is old. Stale. There’s no driver and when he looks at Wade, he just thrums his fingers on his thigh, humming to himself, and the car flies off to join the others.

“Dopinder’s a sentimental fool,” Wade finally says. “So I had it revamped.”

 _“This is the taxi I first used to kidnap Bandu, my love rival,”_ comes Dopinder’s voice from the radio.

Peter looks at Wade.

“I had nothing to do with it.”

_“But Mr. Pool, you said—”_

“Watch out, Dopinder!”

Dopinder swerves the car into the other lane and almost hits a coming hover-car before he returns them safely on their side. Wade looks back.

“False alarm! Thought it was… your dead grandma whom I never met. Anywho! The past is the past. Let’s concentrate on the future ten minutes when we’ll get up there and beat some ass.”

Peter is too deep in his shock at the whole surreal feeling that surrounds Wade to bother saying anything else for the next ten minutes. When they finally stop, the street is deserted and there are only huge warehouses flanking them on both sides for as far as Peter can see on both ends.

“Hey, douche-Cable!” Wade shouts at the top of his lungs as soon as they’re out of the car. “I know you’re there! Show your shiny metal eye—”

Peter’s sense alert him just in time to bodily push Wade off the direct line of plasma bullets that suddenly rain down. He manages to drag him behind the car, using it as a shield.

“You _motherfucker—”_ Wade jumps up, but Peter drags him down again as another series of shots land on the car and a couple of meters away from where they keep their feet gathered to their chest.  

“He’s shooting at us!” Peter screeches. “Next time we’re doing it my way.”

“He’s shooting _at Dopinder!”_ Wade fires back, just as heated. “Imma make his butthole so wide, Titanic will sink like a bag of wet potatoes!”

“We need a plan, Wade,” Peter hisses. “He’s military trained. We need to—”

A hard thud lands behind the car and they both fall silent.

“Wade Wilson, you better come out willingly or I’m gonna draw these walls with your innards.”

Wade turns his head, but pauses. “You’ve seen Deadpool 2, you know how I answered this much dark talk, so I’m not gonna repeat myself.” He takes out two pistols. “It’s showtime.”

After that, Peter remembers things in still shots and blurred images. He only knows that his main concern was to protect Wade from a Terminator hell-bent on killing him. Not that the holes in Wade’s body didn’t heal almost as fast as they were made, but Peter was still not okay with the whole hurt Wade thing.   

That’s why Terminator ends up webbed to high heavens on the wall. He has to change his shooters to web-bombs that contain a tremendous amount of liquid webs.

“I thought we had somethin’ special there,” Wade says, as if they have been conversing for the past half hour. “You an’ me against the world. Isn’t that how the song goes?”

“Fuck off.” Good luck struggling, pal. Those webs won’t come off that easily. “You were and still are off the hooks.”

“You betrayed me! Slept with Special Forces and then ratted me out! Traitor— you’re a traitor to the sanctity of marriage!”

Peter cocks an eyebrow at Wade. They’re both standing in front of the guy. But what Peter doesn’t understand is why they are talking to him instead of killing him.

“Mission’s a mission. You betrayed the mission first.”

“So the mission’s more important than this chunk of fried-meat-with-sour-avocado-on-top-of-it’s feelings?”

“Yes.”

Wade gasps and clutches his chest. Peter rolls his eyes and webs Terminator’s mouth not unlike Jameson had his. He turns around and walks away, intent on leaning on the hover-car and wait for him to die.

“Baby boy, no!” Wade stops him with a hand on his shoulder, midway to the car. “Don’t kill him.”

“He betrayed you and then came back to kill you. I’m not gonna let him see another day.”

Wade shakes his head. “It’s not him that came with the idea of killing me. And I can’t die, remember.”

“You almost did,” he whispers, a stubborn frown etched on his forehead.

“Yeah, but you saved me, so it’s—”

“No, it’s _not okay!”_

“I know, I know,” Wade says, and then Peter shoots more webs in the general direction of Cable at his back since the guy thought he could use this to work through the webs. “And there will be lots of others coming back to kill me.”

“I’m gonna kill them all.”

“I love you, too.” He gasps just as Peter freezes. “Too soon! What’s the author of this fic doing, anyway, making me declare my undying love to Webs? Moving too fast here!”

“Not fast enough,” Peter says and has his mask dissolve around his mouth and nose just as he lifts Wade’s and Wade throws a katana at Cable.

“Just because we’re having a moment here doesn’t mean—”

The rest of it is swallowed up by Peter’s mouth, hot and wet and demanding.

“I’m still gonna kill him.”

“No, you ain’t.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“No, but I can convince you otherwise.”

Peter lifts an eyebrow. “Bribing me with sex won’t work.”

Wade gasps a sudden laugh. “Sex bribing! He said sex— baby boy, bribing with sex is _so_ 2018! We’ve come far from that!” Turns his head. “Kidding. I’m gonna end up bribing him with sex.”

“Okay,” he says, and takes a step back, arms crossing on his chest. “Convince me.”

He looks at Spidey then at Cable, then back at Spidey, and continues doing this until he curses and puts his hands on his hips.

“Let’s make a deal!”

“You want to make a deal with the guy they sent to off you?”

“Well,” he leans to one side to look at Cable, still wheezing from the air that comes in through the sliced part of the web his katana did. “He’s in a position where he can’t refuse what we’re offering.”

“And what’s that?”

“A clean slate. I’m gonna forget and forgive him for betraying me, and he won’t try to kill me.”

“Wade. Not long ago he unapologetically said that you betrayed the mission first. This guy puts the mission above anyone. He’d put it above his daughter if it came to that.”

“Not true,” comes the almost mumbled reply.

“Shut it,” Peter says at the same time as Wade, “Nobody asked you!”

They pause, staring at each other for a good minute. Then Peter disentangles his arms and sighs, turning towards Cable and approaching him with Wade by his side. He tears down the web covering his mouth and Cable gulps air like he’s been in space for the past half hour without oxygen. Considering how he looks, Peter’s pretty sure he would manage to stay alive that much.

“Deal’s like follows: I release you and refrain from killing you right where you’re standing, and in turn you give up your mission.”

“Impossible. I have to report back. With proof.”

“I can give him my head,” Wade says.

“I’m pretty sure they know you can grow it back.” He looks at Cable. “What kind of proof?”

“His body. In a cryopod.”

“Wait, they don’t want me dead?”

“It’s as close to death as you can be, you immortal douchebag.”

Peter punches him in the stomach, but because of the copious amounts of webs keeping him glued to the wall, his head is the only thing doubling over.

“Oh, baby boy, it’s okay. He’s always compli-insulted me. It’s our thing.”

“Do you know what this means, Wade? That you’d be stashed away on an unregistered moon or base as soon as they get their hands on you. Worse, they might experiment on you again,” he says more quietly.

Wade doesn’t say anything, his focus on Cable.

“Experiment?”

Peter pauses, then looks back at Wade. “He doesn’t know?”

“I’ve been wearing this suit for twenty years straight.” Peter stares. “Okay, with toilet and shower breaks.”

“You tell me that he’s never seen you without the mask?” He doesn’t believe that. Not if they’ve been part of the same team. “But you said that you were friends.”

“I’d rather saw my flesh arm off than be friends with him,” Cable grouses.

“Say that again and I’m gonna make that wish come true,” Peter says in his I-mean-business voice. Even going so far as to take a step forward.

Wade takes off his mask. “Special Forces’ less known branch, Weapon X, specializes in torturing people that are terminally ill and injecting them with all sorts of crazy stuff until you either die or die and come back a monster. A monster they can use. They used me for a decade until I said no and did what I knew was right on that mission that you’ve kept hanging over my head ever since. They’ve let me be for the past decade. What changed?”

Cable is silent for too long and Peter is prepared to punch him again to snap him out of the trance.

“You’ve become a liability to the organization. You’ve disclosed classified information.”

“They lied to you.”

“With that mouth on you, I don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry, darling, we’re divorced, remember? I won’t let you flirt yourself back into marriage.”

“If they’re lying, where’s the proof?”

Wade pauses. “My ship’s logs. Every call in and out of it since I’ve been living there for the past decade, mostly. As well as my routes.”

“You could’ve wiped out anything fishy.”

Wade cocks his head. “You have a metal arm that dubs as something close to Artificial Intelligence. You could get into my ship’s computer and find out everything. Even the wiped out logs you yap about.”

He looks at both of them. “Fine. Release me so I can check them.”

Peter takes a step forward, hands poised to rip the webs.

“No funny moves or you’re going back on the wall,” he warns before releasing Cable.

The drive to Wade’s ship is tense, so tense that not even Dopinder chirps anything. On the ship, Cable connects to the computer, Wade warning him to be gentle since Dopinder lives there. And to Dopinder he tells him to give Cable access to everything.

It takes Cable about seven minutes to find something. When he does, Peter’s spider senses alert him a second too late of Cable’s intentions, as he whirls around and slams Wade against the hull of the ship, flesh hand pushing against his throat and a gun trained at his temples.

“The most recent ship log had you on Mothra Sixth Base, docked in section A6, notorious for being the preferred docking for Jyn’ai. You met with them, didn’t you?”

Peter is about to tear Cable away from Wade, when Wade nods.

“What was your business with them?”

“They had information I needed.”

“On what.”

“If I tell you, I’ll have to—” Wade struggles against the increasing force of Cable’s forearm and Peter manages to push him away from Wade.

He puts himself between Wade and Cable, but Wade brushes past him, getting too close to Cable for Peter’s comfort zone.

“Do you know that people have disappeared from around the Biollante Pentagon? People like Reed Richards and Bruce Banner.” He turns his attention back to Peter. “That’s why the Avengers didn’t come back for you. They’re busy looking for their Anger-Management-Issues Green Bean.” Turns back to Cable. “But their information came at a high price, and I almost died.”

“Yeah, right.”

“He almost did,” Peter says, coming to stand at Wade’s side, arms seemingly lax, but poised to attack should it be required. “Doctor Strange helped him get rid of the drug. He said that it wasn’t man made, so it must have come from someplace else. Jyn’ai are not known to use such dirty tricks on those who they have contact with.”

“Best guess is that they were manipulated by someone or something far more powerful than they are,” Wade says.

Cable returns to the computer and accesses it once again.

“Dopinder,” Wade stage-whispers. “What’s he doing?”

_“He’s using the radio frequency of our ship to connect to the Mothra Sixth Base. Hacking into their surveillance system.”_

Wade releases a relieved sigh and Peter lifts an eyebrow, but because of the mask it just results in him staring at Wade.

“I thought he was gonna find out about the photos I sneakily took of him in different, erm, indecent poses.” Peter stares some more. “No, don’t worry, baby boy. I’m gonna get rid of them. They’re old anyway. Haven’t looked at them in years. Scouts honor.”

“Is this gonna become a thing?”

“What this?”

“You and your past lovers showing up to kill you.”

Wade gasps a fake laugh. “He thinks Cable’s my past—” More fake laughter. He takes one step to be in Peter’s personal space, and leaning down, he murmurs, “Cable’s only ever been my frenemy, despite what he says, and the other people I hooked up with— well, they’re a thing from the past.”

_“You smoked seven cartons of cigarettes after your last girlfriend dumped you.”_

“Not helping, Dopinder! And she didn’t dump me. I dumped her. It was a mutual dumping.” Turns his head. “Quote, unquote.”

Peter crosses his arms, so Wade sighs.   

“Okay, maybe some of them will return for whatever reason, but they’re in the past. Got over them.”

“I don’t share.”

“Good! Neither do I.”

“I mean it, Wade.”

“If you two pussies finished there, I’ll take my leave now.”

Peter cocks his head. “You certainly haven’t been with one, if you think that that’s an insult to me.”

“What did you find?” Wade says.

For a moment, Cable looks like he’s about to brush Wade off and not say anything, but then he reconsiders.

“Your pals, the kidnapped ones, are in a secret facility, reinstated Weapon X under the name of— The Facility.”

Wade gasps another fake laugh, even going so far as slapping his thighs. It is actually amusing, but Peter doesn’t do more than an upturn of his lips— masked by the nanotech suit.

He turns his head. “That’s what happens when you let two _dudes_ name things in comic issues.”

Cable ignores Wade as he walks towards the exit.

“Don’t be too soft on them,” he calls out. “They deserve it!”

Cable salutes and disappears from their view, and Peter dissolves his mask.

“Karen.”

_“Yes, Peter.”_

“Send the information about Mr. Richards and Mr. Banner to JARVIS.”

_“Sent.”_

Wade’s mask is once again a ridiculous replication of _The Scream_.

“Your suit talks to you!”

“If you’d let me, I’d upgrade yours and install Dopinder—”

“Nah. I’m good. I like the way my suit is. Though why did you help the Avengers? Aren’t they like your arch nemeses?”

The black mask dissolves and Peter grins viciously. “Now they owe me.”

Wade snorts and shakes his head, but Peter still stares at Wade as if he shifted slightly and the new angle reveals new things about Wade.

“What? Is there something on my face?” he says as he touches the mask feverishly.

“Your place is thrashed.”

“Yeah, that’s what happens when old friends come to visit.”

“I can help you clean,” Peter offers as he moves towards the hangar doors.

Pause.

“Naughty, naughty, baby boy!”  

And the tip of Peter’s ears might or might not be tinged red before the mask covers his face once again. He stops right before stepping out of the ship.

“I’ll give you a lift home.”

“Baby boy,” Wade whispers reverently. “You know how to make a girl’s heart catch fire.”

He runs towards Peter, hopping when he nears his arachnid at the same time as Peter shoots a line, catching Wade with one arm, and they swing out of the ship, Wade’s _whoopings_ garnering shouts from disgruntled people.


	9. Chapter 9

“Aw, man, are you shitting me?” he says as he reads the message Strange sent them after Peter asked for an update on the Jyn’ai matter. “Really? No immortal enemy wanting to singe my ass? C’mon! What’s a guy supposed to do to get that kinda nasty attention around here? Been bustin’ my ass up and down this Pentagon for what? An accident?”

“You almost died. I think it’s enough.”

“Baby boy! That’s not the point!”

“There is no point, Wade.”

“Point is,” — Peter groans and stands up from where he was vegetating on the couch — “that I deserve better than this! I demand retribution!”

That has Peter lift an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m gonna go and put holes in this Doorman thing.”

“No. No, no. You won’t do any such thing.”

“Imma!”

“Strange already took care of it. Dormammu is not our concern.”

“He just became when he turned me into a wrong-place-wrong-time kinda guy! I won’t stand for such injustice. Just you wait and see, baby boy!”

Peter sighs.

He’s in his comfy pair of trousers, the ones that leave breathable room between his skin and the material, his worn-out tee, and Wade’s trying to ruin his perfectly normal, insufferably boring day?

Not if he has any say in it.

There’s the end of the couch and about four steps between himself and putting Wade’s craziness on hold, if not to rest. He bridges the distance between them easily, pulling Wade down by his hoodie into a dirty kiss.

Wade complies readily, arms sneaking on his lower back and plastering Peter to him, and Peter pushes him back until he hits the wall, at which point he hoists Wade up by the thighs. The delighted moans at this obvious show of strength are something Peter swallows down like he’s been thirsting for this. He takes Wade into the bedroom letting them both down on the mattress.

“Are you bribing me with sex?” Wade cackles.

Peter smirks down at him. “The more you talk, the less times you get to come.”

“We’re going for a record?”

“Not if you keep that mouth running.”

“How am I gonna tell you how good it feels then?”

Peter already discarded his tee, Wade’s hands roaming over his skin, pleasantly warm and rugged. The feeling of them is exhilarating and he closes his eyes, enjoying the attention.

“You’re a man of action, you’ll find a way.”

The world topples, and Peter finds himself looking up at Wade instead of down. He mirrors the grin his lover’s sporting, letting him have his way with Peter. For now. Besides, he never was one to turn down body worshipping which seems to be one of Wade’s favorite kinks. Hot lips trail down from his neck, palms almost ticklish in their lightness, the slow up and down along his sides has Peter sigh, his own hands zipping down Wade’s hoodie and sneaking inside. There’s only hot, scarred skin there and Wade hums softly, licking patches of skin here and there.

One hand dips into Peter’s waistband and Peter arches his hips up, expecting Wade to get rid of them. But nothing of the sort happens, so he huffs and uses his strength to draw Wade up by his ribs into an impatient kiss, which Wade gentles. That’s when Peter’s hands roam free over his back, exploring, caressing, following the dips and climbs of the scars.

Wade shudders under his fingers and licks into his mouth. Then there’s an insistent press of rock hard into rock hard, and Peter moans unabashedly into the kiss. Wade bites his lip for his effort and Peter grins viciously at him just as his hands sneak beneath the threadbare lounge pants and knead _that_ _ass._

Wade hums, biting his lower lip and letting his hips roll with the movement, dragging fabric over fabric and making Peter gasp as Wade’s groin presses at just the right angle to have Peter’s eyes roll back into his head and stop thinking about the next step.

They both enjoy the roll and the friction, gasping and humming, and Peter doesn’t want this to stop, Wade’s ass perfectly firm in his hands.

But like with all perfect things, they slow down. They don’t become less perfect, but they lose from their intensity. Peter flips them over even before Wade leaned back far enough to look at him, and then his wiry body undulates over his, teasing Wade’s skin just to hear the man gasp and grab Peter’s hips to thrust upwards.

He grins, drinking in Wade’s half-lidded eyes, features suffused by pleasure. Exactly what he wanted Wade to feel, so he lets him guide Peter’s hips as hard and as fast as he wants— _needs to._

It feels so good to have Wade be this raw, this wanton. He almost comes right there and then, which is why he stops. A frown makes shadows rise between Wade’s eyebrows and Peter kisses him for enough time to leave both of them breathless, and then moves down on his body, taking care to drag his teeth lightly here and there.

Wade’s fingers thread into Peter’s hair, half massaging and half pulling, soft gasps filling Peter’s ears, and he couldn’t be more pleased with himself if a killing went smoothly.

He frees Wade’s cock in one swift move and meets his glazed over gaze, challenging in a way, but mostly he wants to see Wade’s face as he goes down on him. And he doesn’t fail to deliver. His hips buckle up, mouth expelling curses and groans, but Peter expected that, so he pins them down, and pushes down until his nose bumps into his groin.

Swallowing around Wade’s cock, has him raise his voice as he curses and hips strain against Peter’s iron hold on them, and he’d like to smile at that, but he doesn’t want to stop. Not when Wade seems to lose control of himself.

That’s exactly what Peter wants.

So he works his throat and then tongue, slow and methodical, but then adding lips and sucking once, hard, then returning to tease him. By the time Peter’s jaw grows tired, Wade’s precome leaks so profusely that a large wet patch darkens the front of his lounge pants.

Peter lets Wade’s hips go for the time it takes him to get those pants off to his ankles, and Wade uses this opportunity to thrust into Peter’s mouth. His eyes water a bit, but he doesn’t stop Wade, not until he gets in a few thrusts, and then draws back completely.

He gathers all the precome from the corner of his lips as he takes in Wade, naked and flushed, breathing like he’s been under for far too long. His eyes spy several tubes of different colors and heights on the bedside table, but they zero in on one in particular. Leave it to Wade to have four kinds of lube on display.

He takes the one that he’s familiar with and then meets Wade’s gaze.

“C’mon, baby boy,” he urges and Peter cocks an eyebrow because that’s not what he expected to hear.

But since he’s been hesitating so much, Wade surges forward and drags him down, kissing and licking into his mouth with impatience. The palms, this time, travel down, down, fingers dip underneath his pants and push the material as far on his thighs as he can, their cocks sliding against each other what with Peter’s hips undulating.

Wade manages to free one ankle from his trousers and twine his legs behind Peter’s back, urging him to be rougher and faster. It’s not that Peter doesn’t want exactly that what with his orgasm pulsing at the base of his spine, but he also wants to take care of Wade and his pleasure.

He’s not sure how he lubed himself up, considering that Wade keeps him down to explore his mouth inch by inch, but he does. At a certain point he squeezes too much and if he didn’t empty the bottle, then at least half of it is coating his hand and Wade’s groin, before he loses the lube.

Then it’s probing blindingly and Wade opening his legs more. There’s moaning and groaning involved, Wade biting his lips, pulling at his hair in such a way as to be more arousing than painful and Peter’s two fingers in, opening Wade up before he lines himself up and bottoms out.

With how much Wade’s moving underneath him and how many sounds get out of his mouth once they break apart to _breathe_ it’s no wonder that Peter doesn’t immediately find a rhythm.

Wade cackling like a mad person and Peter joining him is not helping their current situation, so Peter stops and touches Wade’s chest with his forehead, waiting for whatever made him laugh get out of his system.

“This is so ridiculous,” Peter says. _“You’re_ ridiculous!”

But Wade laughs harder, a contrast, in a way, to the fingers carding through his hair. Peter lets himself be enveloped in Wade’s rumbling laughter, warm body, and strong arms.

When he looks up, shaking his head, Wade’s already calmed down, and Peter can’t resist kissing him. Not when his eyes look so soft, when the corners of his mouth paint a small smile.

That’s when he moves, slow at first, but then finding the rhythm he was looking for previously, the thrusts become more pointed— and stronger. Wade shouts when Peter goes so deep inside him that he touches that bundle of nerves that makes Wade shudder beneath him.

Neither resists much after that; not when Peter makes it his mission to hit that point over and over and over again, until Wade’s inner muscles contract around him and shortly after he’s climaxing in short, hot spurts that pool on his quivering stomach.

After that, it’s a mad chase for Peter to reach that high, too, and it takes him a couple more thrusts and he’s gone.

Later, when they climb down from their blissful bubble, Peter scrunches up his nose as movement brings with it the realization that they’re a mess of semen and lube and sweat.

“We’ll shower later,” Wade mumbles, vice-like arms gathering him close to his chest before rolling him over so that Wade’s wide body covers most of Peter.

But Peter’s having none of that.

Wade huffs a laugh when Peter reverts their positions even though Peter grimaces at the mess between their groins when he passes one leg between Wade’s.

“I kill,” he mumbles, face smushed into Wade’s chest as he’s splayed himself all over his lover.

The rumbly chuckles please Peter to no end.

“You protect,” he corrects gently.

“After kill.”

It’s silly and so unlike them that they can’t do anything else but laugh at it.

 

***

_—that the Special Forces base has suffered an attack last night around two AM. Reports say that there have been 28 injured, 12 deaths, and two missing.  Colonel William Stryker has declared that the responsible for this attack is Nathan Summers, codename Cable, Special Forces’ best military tactician. This is what Colonel Stryker has said about the rogue._

_“He is a threat to humanity! A deranged mind like his cannot be allowed to roam free. It’s true that he was a part of the Special Forces for decades, but we are not responsible for this cold-blooded murder. This attests to the fact that he is smart enough to pass the psych evaluations without raising any alarms, so it is each and everyone’s duty as a citizen and as an ally to report any sighting of this murderer for we will not—”_

Her knife pauses for a split second, before she resumes cutting the tomatoes into slices and arranging them on the plate.

“You should’ve used the attic.”

“The veranda door was open. It was the fastest way to the kitchen.”

“In a hurry,” — she looks back at the spy leaning against the free portion of the wall near the door — “Natasha?”

“Sort of.” She appears calm, but May knows that she’s anything but.

“Anything you have to say? I don’t think you came all the way here just to watch me prepare dinner for my guests.”

There’s only the sound of her knife slicing the tomato for a while.

“He helped us,” Natasha finally says. “Why?”

May lets the silence gather.

“I don’t know what that boy’s up to most of the time. Why don’t you ask him yourself? I’m not his mother.”

“You trained him.”

“I trained you, too.”

“You were supposed to rescue me— us. Isn’t that what you said? You were there to take us away from them. You didn’t.” Then, whispered, “we were scared, little girls.”

“My mission changed after I got there. I had to do what needed to be done,” May says, steel making the words fall like blocks of ice between them.

Natasha doesn’t say anything for a while and if the back of her neck didn’t prickle as much as it did, May would’ve been convinced Natasha left. She glances to her left at the clock. Natasha has five more minutes before May will see her out.

“He helped the Avengers,” Natasha says like it’s painful to admit.

“At least he knows how to control his grudges.”

“Tell him that we owe him one.”

“I think he knows that already, dear.”

Natasha shifts. May’s aware of that because of a soft _sst_ in the air.

“Reilly.”

May smiles at the knife. “Romanov.”

The prickling disappears and tension that’s been creeping up in her shoulders subsides just as the doorbell rings and she goes to let her guests in.

“That smells _delicious,_ Aunt May!” Wade says with a smile which May mirrors, noticing Peter narrowing his eyes at the living room behind her. “What mortal enemy did you cook up for dinner tonight?”

She chuckles and accepts the hug, a waft of subtle perfume reaching her nose as the strong arms almost engulf her, but not into a tight hug.

“Oh, just your run-of-the-mill turkey, darling.”

He elbows Peter which jolts him out of his accurate feeling of displacement. Her boy has always been perceiving.

“She called me darling!”

Peter smiles and shakes his head. He’s dressed in a black button-down shirt and cream suit pants; the suit jacket hangs by the door and his shirt sleeves are already rolled up to his elbows. He never quite liked this formal attire. Wade, on the other hand, is dressed in denim and a long sleeved deep red Henley over a white shirt, he too keeping them up to his elbows.

These boys.

Peter gathers May into a tight hug, feeling him breathing her in.

“Did you have any other recent guests?” Peter murmurs into her coiffed hair.

“Nobody new or important. Now, pleasantries taken care of, let’s get to the part where we dig in.”

“Thought you’d never say that, Aunt May!” Wade says and they follow her towards the kitchen where a table rich with food and colors awaits them.

Wade is so happy at the sight of it that he drags Peter into a side hug and places a loud kiss on his temple to her boy’s just as loud protest. But she doesn’t miss the arm that snuck behind Wade’s back, hand lying on his hip or the way he can’t quite mask the joy in his eyes or the smile that doesn’t want to go away.

Her boy has finally found someone special.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is it for this one. I hope you enjoyed reading this fic the same way as I enjoyed writing it XD


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